Hey guys n gurls, I was wondering if it is smart to disable my VPN connection for casual browsing.
Reasons: when having VPN constantly running it may be possible to track me via browser fingerprinting.
Szenario: the connection coming from the VPN which hypothetically downloaded a torrent, tries to watch capitalist propaganda while living in China, etc.pp has this screen ratio, this locale, this addons etc. And (more important) the YouTube login cookie we know belongs to this physical person/telephone number etc.
So I am wondering if I should only use the VPN when “needing” it (read articles not available in country, Netflix, read information government doesn’t like, things like that.) Or if I’m missing something here and I could obscure my causal day to day browsing as well without decreasing the security of the VPN.
For reference, the VPN doesn’t log anything (for more than a day) to my knowledge
EDIT: From what I understand from the comments: switching the VPN has little to no impact on widely used tracking and if at all makes it easier to corelate data. People emphasize the general lack of full privacy if you are wanted by entities willing to spend enough resources. But for the general need of privacy in normal usecases it makes more sense to just leave the VPN running.
Personally I’d rather my ISP see more of my internet activity as I think they are less likely to be interested in using/selling as much of my data (or be compromised in some way) as a VPN company. But I could be wrong.
Shortly after the net neutrality rules where first revoked mine sent a message asking me to opt out of gathering data for sale, so defiantly not always the case. Not trusting some checkbox to prevent them from doing so in the future got everything that can be put through tunnels since.
Ah that’s too bad, guess I can’t really blame you then.