In the U.S., Australia, and the EU, October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Amnezia VPN not only restores access to your favorite resources but also protects your dataб so we’re joining the initiative.
Over the course of the month, we’ll cover what information specific sites collect, how to protect children and parents online, and the risks tied to smart homes.
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The Sites You Visit
Even before you enter the wider internet, your connection passes through your internet service provider, ISP. Most often, it sees which sites you visit. Even though the HTTPS protocol encrypts the data being transmitted, on its own it doesn’t hide all the information about your network connection. Let’s break it down with an example:
- You want to go to the site
amnezia.org. - To avoid landing on the wrong resource, your computer sends a request to the provider: “Which IP address do I connect to in order to reach
amnezia.org?” - The DNS resolver on the provider’s side looks up the requested address in the DNSDomain Name System and returns the IP. In the process, the provider sees the address you’re looking for.
- When your computer establishes a connection with the server during the TLS handshake, the provider can pull the unencrypted amnezia.org address from the SNIServer Name Indication field. This simplifies certificate handling and also helps when several resources are hosted on a single IP.
- The result is the same: the provider sees the address you’re heading to. There’s no privacy.
Providers monetize this information — for example, they trade it with other companies or outright sell it to data brokers. This info gives businesses a free hand when it comes to profiling: marketers, for instance, get a better understanding of your preferences, and insurers get an idea of your lifestyle and habits.
How to protect yourself: the quickest way is to enable DoHDNS-over-HTTPS at the browser level or DoTDNS-over-TLS at the system level.
If you don’t want to dig through settings, use a VPN to route your traffic through a closed channel and hide the addresses of the sites you visit. Keep in mind that the provider will still see the fact that you’ve connected to the network and the volume of data transmitted. Your data will also be available to the services you connect to.
Data About Your Internet Connection
Often, besides providers, there are additional services sitting between you and the external network. Their number, and how curious they are, most often depends on the region you’re in. Most often, these are:
- Network operators — relevant if you connect through public Wi-Fi at a cafe, hotel, or university. That’s exactly why we strongly advise using a VPN when you go online through an unfamiliar network.
- Mobile operators — essentially act as providers for your smartphones and tablets, with all the privacy risks that entails.
- DPI systems and the TSPUTechnical Measures to Counter Threats — relevant for Russia and other countries with a high level of internet censorship. They analyze traffic by indirect signs, including metadata, to close off access to banned resources.
- DNS resolvers, autonomous systems, and other infrastructure elements — see which sites you go to and the volumes of traffic transmitted.
How to protect yourself: in some cases an ordinary VPN will be enough. But, to be clear, getting around state-level censorship will require a specialized VPN service with a dedicated location.
To hide the sites you visit from DNS systems, Amnezia Self-hosted users can turn on the dedicated AmneziaDNS feature — we’ve put together detailed instructions for them.
Notifications from Apps on Mobile Devices
The system push-notification services of iOS and Android — APNsApple Push Notification service and FCMFirebase Cloud Messaging — aggregate notifications from all the apps on your smartphone or tablet.
On the one hand, this is convenient: developers don’t have to build their own push services. On the other, the concentration of these messages makes it easier to track your preferences and actions.
You don’t even need to open the app — it’s enough for the system to receive a notification from it. Google and Apple will know which service sent you a notification, to which device, and at what time.
In 2023, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden accused Apple and Google of handing over user data to the government agencies of several countries. In response, both companies tightened their control over the information — access to it is possible only as part of court proceedings.
How to protect yourself: you can’t, at least with the built-in tools of iOS or Android. The system push services can’t be turned off, but we only know of cases in which Apple and Google handed data over to government agencies, not to marketers.
“Who Even Needs My Data”
As you can see, information about you is so valuable that it’s collected before you even connect to the target site.
Amnezia Premium protects against online surveillance on several levels at once, and the constantly expanding list of locations will make things harder for censors and data brokers.
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