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The original author of the article is Dennis Schubert.
The article Do I need a VPN to avoid being tracked? is extracted from https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-narrative.html and was translated and adapted by DebianMan.
“VPN – a Very Precarious Narrative” by Dennis Schubert is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Advertisements for commercial VPNs explicitly state that IP addresses are how “you are always tracked online by social media sites and marketing companies.” But is it really like that? So, we all know that Facebook It is one of major players in the “people tracking” business; so if you have an active subscription with a VPN provider and an account Facebook, let's do a test together!
- Open a new private window/recognition window in your Browsers favorite.
- In this window, open two tabs: Facebook, and the page of your VPN provider where your current IP is shown.
- Log in to your account Facebook.
- With the VPN disabled, check that the VPN “test” site shows “you are not protected” or “You are not using so-and-so VPN” or something similar (depends on the service).
- Now connect to your VPN. Refresh the VPN test page, which should now say that your IP is hidden and your connection is secure. Right?
- Now, move on to the tab Facebook, and press reload.
So what happened? Facebook forgot who you are and took you back to the login form? No, of course not. Even if your IP address changed, Facebook still knew who you were and you are still logged in. Just like marketing companies and other tracking entities.
Do I need a VPN to avoid being tracked?
The reality is that your IP address is only a small part of your traceable profile and rather unreliable as such. Tracking companies are interested in tracking you, not a specific device or a specific browsing session. Your IP changes constantly, take your mobile phone as an example: you may be connected to your home WiFi, your mobile connection, your work network, etc., and you will have a different IP in each network. Furthermore, in most cases these IPs are not even unique: most mobile phone networks share their public IPs with hundreds, sometimes thousands of mobile phones in a process called NAT. Tracking companies need to distinguish between all these people; otherwise, their profile would be perfectly useless.
Tracking companies have much more advanced methods. A well-known identification method are i Cookies, small pieces of data in your Browsers or in your mobile client. However, since i Cookies can be easily modified or removed by users, trackers have developed much more sophisticated technologies, such as tracking fingerprints of Browsers and even the recognition of behavioral patterns to uniquely identify users. All these things cannot be influenced or altered in any way by one VPN.
If you are worried about these things, then use a Browsers with built-in tracking protection features. In Firefox, Multi-Account Containers And Facebook Containers, for example, help block tracking sites in their isolated sandbox, so they can't track you when you're not actively using them.
The slogan “a VPN lets you surf anonymously” is just marketing.
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