I was talking to my friend yesterday about VPNs, he’s a I.T guy who works at some computer service place and I talked to him about VPNs and which ones he reccomends to me, straight away he warned me not to use a vpn if its free, Never at all. I asked for an explanation and he basically summed it up to me that VPNs link your IP in a way that if dirty stuff like child pornography etc passes through that vpn since a lot of anonymous people use VPNs for that, your IP can be traced from it. He tried to explain it like “your IP has some rope, and that rope is then attatched onto the VPN… any dark shit that the VPN passes through will come back to you” He then further explained that paid vpns are more secure and prevent this risk. It’s not automatically possible that some kind of dark shit has passed through that vpn, however there is a chance…
Your IP address may be made public and traceable through a public VPN, and it may log where you access (but if it is https/encrypted it cannot tell what the contents off an address were).
Also an IP address is not evidence of a crime. You can get a new one easily, and multiple people may be under a same network IP.
A paid VPN will not log your connections (where you connect to) if stated in its ToS. That is one good feature to pay for.
Maybe he was confusing that with operating a TOR gateway. The point of a VPN is to create an encrypted tunnel from your PC or network to the VPN server. This allows you to surf on open networks without fear of a man in the middle attack, like connecting to random wifi’s or from a hotel. It can also be used for bad things as well, like most things in life. Mostly they are used for connecting remote offices to one another over the internet securely.
What he is talking about is some network topology where when you join, data from other users will be routed through your computer or router. This is not how a VPN works.
Sounds like a load of bullshit, stuff doesn’t just link to you. It is possible that someone at one time used the same IP address as you but it is extremely unlikely that you would ever get in trouble for something someone else did with your ip because of mac addresses, which uniquely identify your computer.
Thank you for this information, although I think some people should be aware of your IP being made public before making the decision to go ahead with this.
I went through a couple of threads literally 2 minutes ago and some of the responses just say “use vpn…” without explaining what “risks” are associated with it.
You are right it’s highly unlikely that your IP can be used as evidence due to many people using ToR etc however i believe that some awarness needs to be generated before dismissing everyone by saying “use a vpn lol”
Is this why Levelcap also said “there is a way to play it early…but it’s not reccomended” (or something similar) on his latest video? i remember seeing some DICE dev say something similar a while ago
This is what i came here to ask, I didn’t know wether he is right or wrong, some people are telling me one half of the story while others are telling me the other.
he told me a story of a guy he knew that just used a vpn to get hold of some games and after that he noticed that his download and upload speed went really fast and aparently police came knocking and he was informed that his IP address was used for trafficing CP from asia, to europe to the USA or some shit lol!
I have no idea what he is saying by that. There is no webpage or something listing the IP addresses connected to the VPN network.
Also the server (e.g. the Origin shop in Mexico) does not see your IP address. Instead all he sees is the IP address of the VPN exit point. That is the whole point of using a VPN for this. To hide the true origin of the connection.
Because two things happen in succession, it does not automatically mean that the first one caused the second one. It is a classic logic fallacy.
He caught himself some virus / trojan that turned his computer into a traffic node for these people. Has nothing to do with how a VPN operates. Also, nothing “lol” about this. It is quite the problematic legal situation he got himself into, even if had no idea about the traffic routing.