staticsafe

Perhaps I should clarify that I am not discouraging the use of VPNs, but I am encouraging more involvement in the policy process. Indirectly, I guess I am encouraging a better understanding about the intricacies of VPN services.

A hybrid approach as you suggest seems agreeable to me.

Some food for thought: Such data can include say, the fact that a certain person enjoys some fetishes or maybe some other similarly compromising data.

The possibility for blackmail exists and therefore the possibility of your freedom being curtailed.

At the risk of sounding increasingly naive:

I believe policy is important as a part of the solution because it is a matter of protecting the general public not just a select technically capable.

Yes, policy is hard and can be useless but I still believe it is an important goal to fight towards.

You can care about your privacy, use a VPN and use the democratic process to enact policy change. Those things need not be mutually exclusive. VPNs are only a part of the solution and incomplete, not the solution.

You can guess some of it trivially, cloud services such as AWS are popular and mask the ORG using the IP addresses.

Example: any traffic to 17.0.0.0/8 = user probably has an Apple device

That is still a significant amount of traffic to analyze and store data for.

I don't want to speculate further as I don't know what margins for transit providers in NA look like.

That would depend on your traffic levels and which instance type you want to use.

This should help figure things out: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

VPNs will definitely incur overhead and latency costs, yeah.

OpenVPN can be fairly slow if you are sharing CPU usage (ex. VPS provider) with other users. You are also most likely implementing NAT on your VPN server which is probably not accelerated unless you are paying for an expensive appliance that does so.

SSH tunnels work in a pinch (OpenSSH is <3). However for coverage across devices such as smartphones OpenVPN works better long-term.

DNSCrypt + HTTPS everywhere solves the latency issue but it doesn't solve some of the other issues.

You still need the technical know-how to set up a DNSCrypt recursive resolver. The resolver then talks to the respective recursive chain in plain text as DNSCrypt is not something that is widely adopted.

If I was a betting man - backbone providers don't do this (sell to advertisers).

It would be costly to maintain the interception/analysis infrastructure required for such data collection.

I daresay it would cost more than what they would make off the data.

That font is honestly nearly unreadable on Firefox. Font is too thin.

Site seems to be timing out here.