Can You Be Tracked With a VPN?

Why Do People Use VPNs?

The 2021 VPN security bulletin says that almost 30% of people with an Internet connection use a VPN for personal reasons. Another 40% will use one at work, or for mixed work and personal reasons such as work from home. Only 32% of people don't ever use a VPN at all.

Why do they use them? Some are just accessing the VPN to connect to their work network. Others use them over public Wi-Fi to help prevent 'man in the middle' snooping or packet forgery from the hotspot owner or manager. Still others use the VPN to switch what region they appear to be from, bypassing country locks and accessing content or streaming shows that might not otherwise be available in their country. Those are all valid reasons.

However, the vast majority of VPN users attribute some kind of magical privacy and security aspects to the service. And while there are some specific use cases where a VPN will enhance your privacy and security, it isn't as all-encompassing as some apparently think. Some of this misconception is due to software VPN companies doing a lot of aggressive advertising that contains more buzzwords than actual information.

Let's discuss what kind of attacks a virtual private network can really protect you from, and what kind of attacks and tracking are possible even when using a VPN.

What Attacks Does a VPN Really Protect You From?

Before we can answer that, it's important to establish whether we're talking about a hardware VPN or a software VPN.

The vast majority of VPNs that home users adopt are software based. There are a variety of hardware trunking services that are considered VPNs, often set up by companies as part of their edge network. Such services have different benefits and features than the software VPNs we'll be talking about in this article. For more information on the rarer world of OSI Layer 2 VPNs, you'll want to look into Virtual private LAN service (VPLS), IP-only LAN-like service (IPLS), Pseudo wire (PW), and Virtual LAN (VLAN).

As far as the software VPNs go: While useful for some things, such as spoofing the country or region that your Internet traffic is coming from, VPNs aren't magical privacy shields. They are protection against specific kinds of attacks, and nothing more.

Mainly, a VPN can protect you from attacks that would normally take place anywhere between the VPN's entry node and exit node. That network journey simply looks like a black box to the rest of the world.

Because VPNs use tunneling protocols and encryption (typically), it does protect against man in the middle attacks and packet sniffers at the ISP level. This is helpful because it makes mandated government backdoors at the hardware level, also known as network wiretapping, far less useful. It also prevents blind tampering with a packet in transit, providing error detection and correction.

So How Can You Be Tracked With a VPN?

If you're interacting with a website over a VPN, you still need to be extremely careful about the information you share. If you use your real name or address in the sign up information, in forums, in profile settings, or as part of using a payment method such as a debit or credit card… you've simply handed over your information, with or without a VPN.

But even with that level of care and diligence, techniques such as web browser fingerprinting can be used to identify you. The combination of hardware and software information given out by your browser might render a pattern that nobody else in the world shares. To see an example of this in action, visit AmIUnique and see how your combination of parameters compares with the rest of the world.

Perhaps even more sinister, your VPN provider can still see information such as your IP address, any billing or credit card information that you provide, and the like. So if they have an intentional or unintentional backdoor that they share with law enforcement or government intelligence programs, your cover is already blown. If they have rogue ownership, system administrators, or support staff who want to sell off users' personal information for a profit, your cover is blown. If the VPN provider gets hacked, your cover is blown.

And of course, the old school methods such as keyboard logging, malware, and viruses can still work because they have access to your information before it ever passes through the VPN. A compromised device will disallow any kind of real security at a software or network level, so be careful.

Consensual or incidental tracking at the device level is a thing as well. If you keep your phone turned on, it doesn't matter what kind of VPN software you're using because tower triangulation is possible. Similarly, GPS on your phone completely ignores the existence of VPNs, communicating directly with the global positioning satellite network.

Other Privacy Protection Methods

The biggest threat that VPNs don't prevent, assuming that there's no hardware tracking or hacking issues mentioned above, is browser fingerprinting. It will be the number one way that users are tracked starting in 2022, when third party cookies are finally eliminated from all major web browsers.

Privacy app is the best way to mask your browser fingerprint. And there's no better tool for the job than Hoody.

Hoody is an app that defends you against the most common device and web browser fingerprinting and user profiling techniques found on the Internet. It prevents profile tracking, gets around censorship, and searches for alternative sources of web site content if the original service is censored, shut down, or otherwise blocked.

On the file sharing side, Hoody has a Torrent oriented anonymity function. It remembers tracker information so that it can search for additional seeders and download the requested file from a bunch of different sources over multiple protocols.

Because it helps get around censorship anonymously, there is no need for a VPN while using Hoody for privacy.

Conclusion

So, can you be tracked with a VPN? To some extent. That doesn't make VPNs useless, but it does mean that there is much better options if privacy and security are your main goals.

People use software VPNs for specific reasons. They often don't live up to the security and privacy hype that the VPN providers themselves like to spread. Consider making use of privacy app like Hoody that will obfuscate your browser fingerprint, and intelligently get around government censorship.