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In terms of privacy, isn't running your own VPN pointless?

I mean, it is basically just changing your IP and putting an additional hop in. You aren't mixing with other's traffic, making it very easy to fingerprint you.

I guess this is all dependent on someone's threat model, but I am not really sure if there is any benefit of running your own VPN besides being slightly more sure your VPN provider or someone who hacked your VPN provider isn't watching you.



It provides you protection on a hostile local network, such as a hotel or a restaurant. Like you said, it does not achieve the anonymity level a public VPN would.


> protection on a hostile local network, such as a hotel or a restaurant.

Or an American ISP.



> I mean, it is basically just changing your IP and putting an additional hop in. You aren't mixing with other's traffic, making it very easy to fingerprint you.

If that IP is in Russia, on a cheap supplier that has hundreds of similar VPS sitting behind a NAT, I wish em luck in fingerprinting you. Or extracting logs for that matter.


VPNs are not for anonymity. Never were.


It could be somewhat important/interesting to change your public endpoint with the internet to pass country-based filters.

Besides that, as others pointed out, it's a safe way to get out of a compromised network.

And with a DNS blocker on the VPN endpoint, you are also able to block ads/tracking scripts (think of PiHole).




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