Is privacy respecting browsers like LibreWolf or the arkenfox custom user.js really effective in protecting a user’s privacy without a VPN ? I ask this coz I don’t use a VPN so my IP address is not hidden.
I would argue yes, but it depends on:
- if your ISP is NATed.
- how many people are behind that same public IP address from your provider, so where you live.
- if you use another solution like a proxy.
keep in mind that your IP belongs to a certain geographical area, so with a VPN you can control that as well. ultimately I think it is another tool at your disposal, and if you can afford a reputable provider it’s something else under your control, so not bad.
Only thing a vpn adds to your privacy is the change in ip, if you have a dynamic ip (ip changes after router restart) then you pretty much have a free vpn, if not you should be able to change your ip from your router settings.
Also if you log in websites like youtube then a vpn is useless.
If you are really worried about privacy use tor and don’t log into sites, if your an every day user then no ones gonna know it’s you.
Hope this helps.
In many ways, yes it is. In other ways, no it is not. The real answer is that you should be using both.
if your ISP is NATed.
how many people are behind that same public IP address from your provider, so where you live.
When you say NATed do you mean the NAT provided by the router. As far as I know all home router which are running Linux has a firewall & also does NAT. While behind the router all clients receive a Private IP something 192.168.0.x which is not the same as their public IP.
Now the second point. I always thought that irrespective of ISP each customer receive his/her own public IP. Yes, you need to pay extra for a static IP but that’s different. I had no idea that multiple internet users can share the same IP. My public IP changes each time I reboot my router. Tell me something if multiple users are sharing a single public IP & one of them does something bad the rest who have done nothing wrong will become a suspect. Isn’t that unfair ?
Hi. Could you explain a little bit more what is NAT and proxy?
you should be able to change your ip from your router settings
not really, the public address is ISP-provided, and most networks are NATed.
When you say NATed do you mean the NAT provided by the router.
nope, I mean carrier-grade NAT.
While behind the router all clients receive a Private IP something 192.168.0.x which is not the same as their public IP.
the private address is used inside your home LAN, mainly to communicate with the router. then, as you said, the router will allow you to communicate with the outside world (whether it be the internet or your ISP’s network).
I always thought that irrespective of ISP each customer receive his/her own public IP. Yes, you need to pay extra for a static IP but that’s different. I had no idea that multiple internet users can share the same IP.
a lot of (shitty) providers - at least in the EU - don’t give you a internet-facing-IP-address, but instead they give you an IP address that’s valid inside their network, and then they apply NAT translation before exiting on the real world wide web: this means that multiple users share the same IP address, mostly in an effort to address IPv4 scarcity (and make money by selling you private addresses as if they were public).
if multiple users are sharing a single public IP & one of them does something bad the rest who have done nothing wrong will become a suspect
likely not, because the translation happens on the ISP’s network equipment so they can see who generated the traffic and react. instead it can happen at times that a full set of IP addresses belonging to a single provider is temporarily blocked by a service because of one or more malicious users. in that case a portion of the customers might be denied access to the service, until the ISP fixes the issue.
the worst thing is that this solution makes self-hosting a pain in the ass, and also that it is overall a bad solution from a technical standpoint.
My public IP changes each time I reboot my router.
it doesn’t necessarily mean that carrier-grade NAT is being used, it could simply mean that your public IP is not static. imo this is a good thing, unless you need a static ip that’s reachable from the outside (in some cases in the EU providers won’t even sell that to you).
these are rather long and complex concepts, I would suggest you to read up the respective wikipedia pages as they are very well explained.
Carrier-grade NAT (CGN or CGNAT), also known as large-scale NAT (LSN), is a type of Network address translation (NAT) for use in IPv4 network design. With CGNAT, end sites, in particular residential networks, are configured with private network addresses that are translated to public IPv4 addresses by middlebox network address translator devices embedded in the network operator’s network, permitting the sharing of small pools of public addresses among many end sites.
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