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Tor is a method of making you anonymous when accessing services on the internet. For example, say you want to go to google and search “how to get away with murder” and you don’t want Google being able to tell the FBI who you are. Use Tor to access it. Google doesn’t need to do anything to let you use Tor.
VPN is a way of preventing 3rd parties from knowing what you’re sending. You might use it to securely connect to your office (you work at Toyota) and as you download plans for the Toyota Camry 2014 from Toyota’s internal servers, somebody from Honda couldn’t intercept your transmission and get those plans too. Toyota has a server on their end that lets you connect via VPN.
So VPN is to hide from your ISP or network administrator? And Tor is to hide from everyone else?
So for example if you were worried the VPN you’re subscribing to is logging your activity you could use Tor and then be anonymous from the VPN? Is this correct?
VPN is not really to hide from the ISP so much as to establish a secure connection between the server and your home computer. Someone monitoring your internet can see that you are connecting to server XYZ via VPN but they can’t see what you are sending.
TOR hides what you are sending AND who you are connected to.
VPN is common for almost every business out there. TOR is still somewhat marginal and for “privacy freaks” (I say that tongue-in-cheek)
So VPN is to hide from your ISP or network administrator? And Tor is to hide from everyone else?
Yes What Caltrops said
So for example if you were worried the VPN you’re subscribing to is logging your activity you could use Tor and then be anonymous from the VPN? Is this correct?
Most likely you have (your own) username associated with the VPN, so while you could use Tor to connect to the VPN, they’ll still know who you are.
What you could do is, say, move to the Cayman Islands, download Toyota’s plans through their VPN over Tor and sell them to Honda, and they wouldn’t be able to figure out that you’ve gone to a tropical island to retire with wealth. They’d still know you’re RevolverOctopus, but you probably blindsided them by going on vacation and then selling their trade secrets.
TOR hides what you are sending AND who you are connected to.
This is where the main source of my confusion comes from because the Tor website says this under safe browsing practices:
Under no circumstances is it safe to use BitTorrent and Tor together, however.
Is this because your ISP can see that you’re on a torrent site and downloading massive amounts of data, though they cant specifically see what it is. Would a VPN offer another layer of privacy?
Most likely you have (your own) username associated with the VPN, so while you could use Tor to connect to the VPN, they’ll still know who you are.
But the VPN will only know who you are because either you have an employee ID associated with the VPN, or if you pay for a VPN service you are for it in a way that’s traceable to you. Is this also correct?
Apparently some BitTorrent clients allow others to see the source IP even when you are using TOR.
That’s correct.
However, If you pay for a VPN service, it might be from a country that has no legal rules permitting you to be identified to law enforcement. This means that you could use Bittorrent through the VPN all you want and while the VPN service you use knows who you are, the FBI can’t ask them to identify you to Disney’s lawyers.
Right, so would a VPN help in obfuscating that data?
Really the main source of my confusion is just from reading the associated subreddits like r/privacy and r/vpn where they keep implying that using both services is the only way to get true privacy. However from the comments on this thread I’m getting more of the impression that they are interchangeable.
For example, as I said in a comment below the Tor FAQ says:
Under no circumstances is it safe to use BitTorrent and Tor together, however.
Here it would seem to me that a VPN which hides what you’re sending/receiving would complement Tor. Lets say hypothetically I wanted to torrent some movies. If I did with a VPN and Tor, my ISP would only see that I was connected the VPN server, and the Tor browser would hide what websites I was from the VPN so even if the ISP or the RIAA or whoever wanted to get info from the VPN the VPN would have no useable/traceable data because I was using Tor.
Or am I totally off-base here.
yes, very effectively
You can tunnel your web browser through the VPN.
You wouldn’t use VPN for this unless:
- it’s in a country with very weak copyright laws
- no laws requiring the VPN provider to reveal your identity
- and the VPN company can be relied upon to not reveal your identity
These three pretty much replace the advantages of Tor while being much faster. I mean, you could still use Tor on top of this, but the performance loss probably makes it not worth it.
I think the best reason to use Tor is if you can’t anonymously pay for a VPN and need low bandwidth anonymity: perhaps, subversive activity in oppressive countries like Iran or North Korea.
In the US there’s nothing illegal about paying for VPN service abroad, but in North Korea, they could very well (maybe) jail you just for that.
Also, I think using Tor for Torrenting is a bit… selfish. It really is a powerful freespeech tool for citizens of oppressive government and eating up its capacity for downloading movies seems like a poor use of it.
Also, I think using Tor for Torrenting is a bit… selfish.
Can you elaborate a bit on this? I understand that for example Tor is highly dependent on exit nodes which is one of the main reasons its so slow as there are so few of them. However, I was also under the impression that this was also geographically determined. That is, the more exit nodes you have in your immediate geographic zone the better your connection will be. So I guess I’m just unclear as to how me in North America could negatively impact someone in say Syria, or North Korea et. al