Would internet services be subject to, let’s say Swiss privacy laws, if you were connected to a Swiss server from your VPN? And if they do, would it make that much of a difference that it’s worth the occasional hassle of having to change the language and region?
afaik (and I’m no lawyer nor have a legal background) companies operating/hosting physical servers somewhere are subject to local laws and regulations, so yes.
In my view that’s why a “no logging” policy followed by a third party auditing matters, but in the end the local regulations can still force companies to keep certain records to be allowed to operate there. Because of this I wouldn’t pick countries with a poor track of freedom of speech or high censorship as exit if available.
What if I use multihop VPN and set the first location as like Switzerland and set the second location as US?
Sounds like tor with extra steps.
except for the speed is usable and you don’t get bombarded with captcha
What about it?
PIA removed their Russian servers for this very reason.
To add to the exit node thing: many VPN providers, especially the “watch foreign Netflix for cheap” types, lie about where their servers are. They use tricks to misrepresent the location of their IP addresses so that they don’t need to contract 180 different data centers. I’ve seen plenty of Norwegian IP addresses mysteriously originate from Amsterdam. Faking IP geolocation information isn’t that hard to do for most GeoIP databases.
If your exit node pretends to be in one country for its privacy regulations, double check that their servers actually run in that country, or those regulations may be worthless.
The legal policy questions of your exit nodes are interesting, but other people already spoken to that.
Your exit note impacts your latency, packet loss, and browser experience. The more you increase your round trip time the slower your experience becomes.
Another point to browser experience would be local laws / blocked content.
Connecting to a country that has blocked some content will make it so that you can’t see that content. So if you want to read an article and an authoritarian government doesn’t want that, you’re better off connecting to some other place.
A question from me:
Is there a map to show the connections between countries?
I’m curious what the latency is like from my city to other parts of the world, and it would be cool to try and explain the data with where the undersea cables are. It matters for VPNs, but also things like games and video calls.
You basically want to run a ping test, against a variety of endpoints globally. And then look at the graph to see if there’s any outliers or interesting ones. And you will find some. Not all routing is the most efficient.
I don’t know, but gave always assumed, and have some anecdotal evidence, that it can effect how cookies on web sites are handled.
Some large companies can afford to check the geolocation of the source and serve different content; for example, more privacy-respecting options for EU clients, and invasive options for the US. In the early days of right-to-be-forgotten legislation, I noticed different content with better cookie handling options from Google if I exited from an EU country.
These days, I’m less sure it matters. I think the cost of maintaining code to fuck Americans but abide by the law for Europeans isn’t effective, and the same code is used everywhere. That’s certainly likely true for smaller companies.
I keep thinking I should do an empiracle test, but I kinda don’t care that much.
Depends where you enter from
From your moms house.
😂this is what I signed up for
