Pi VPN vs VPN service?

Question

I've been thinking of setting up a pi VPN. After doing some research it seems as though I will increase my protection while on public networks but will do little to anonymize my traffic while using it at home or work. Am I missing anything here? Can anyone weigh in with their 2 cents as to which experience they preferred...?

Answer 1

will do little to anonymize my traffic

Just by setting up a VPN? No, that's actually not the basic purpose of a VPN -- although if that is the only context you have heard of them in, it makes sense that you might think this.

A VPN can be used to anonymize traffic, but it requires additional resources that services who provide them for this reason have, but individuals do not. These "resources" are masses of servers that your requests can pass through, sent via the encrypted VPN tunnel.

You could, of course, include your own remote server in your own VPN and do the same thing, and this would accomplish the goal of concealing your activity from your ISP, and concealing your local IP from websites you vist.

However, if you are talking about concealing activity from a potential investigation (by law enforcement, or someone with a few computer skills), this will not work well because at some point the traffic must be sent to the real destination by the remote server, and it has an IP address that can be traced, and this would be to a remote server that you manage or access.

This raises an interesting point about anonymizing services and the extent to which they keep logs that could latter on be used expose what you were doing.

I Am Anonymous When I Use a VPN – 10 Myths Debunked

I did not read all of that but it came up when I tried googling about anonymizing service logs and seems well written enough.

Note that if you don't have a remote server, getting one ("in the cloud") is not hard but it requires some skills to set up and adminstrate. The base bottom end price for these is ~$5/month which may or may not include enough bandwidth (without paying for the extra) to cover the activity you want anonymized.

Answer 2

When using PiVPN from a mobile device or a public Internet connection, you can encrypt all of your communication as it travels through the Internet back to your home server, and out from there to the Internet. From your home server, you could establish another VPN connection for anonymity, to an online VPN service provider, on the outward journey from your home back out to the Internet. There would no doubt be additional lag caused by the use of both VPN tunnels. By itself, PiVPN protects your communication from prying eyes. With an external VPN service, you anonymize your connection by appearing to come from somewhere else. That is my understanding of how it all works. I hope that helps.