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I live in North America and I use a commercially-provided VPN. I use it to encrypt my connection to the Internet, so that my ISP cannot store logs of my DNS requests or browsing activity. I also use it to mask my IP in certain (non-criminal) situations. I am aware that VPN is not a very secure solution for hardcore activists or total privacy, I use it to mostly prevent mass tracking, such as commercial ad tracking, social network tracking or mass government tracking. I am pretty sure that if someone was after me specifically, my VPN would be useless.

That said, I try to avoid US and Canada servers provided by my VPN. I also often avoid British servers. I favor Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden. My question is, does it really matter, which country I connect to, as long as I trust my VPN provider not to keep logs (which I do)? Or is it all the same? Because if it is, I'd connect to something closer to North America, to improve speeds. Thanks.

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  • If you use something like Switzerland or the Netherlands, your traffic will be going through US borders which guarantees it will be intercepted. If you connect to a US VPN from within the US and connect to a US server, you will only ever be connecting through small ISPs that are less likely to log everything (or even have the technical capability to).
    – forest
    Jun 14, 2018 at 5:36

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The country doesn't matter as much as the Internet provider -- which includes the VPN provider, his hosting company, and that hosting company's ISP.

Your best bet is to:

First, encrypt end-to-end. This should be obvious, but if you're not doing full end-to-end encryption (e.g. using HTTPS) then a VPN isn't going to save you in the end.

Second, build your own tunnel. Don't rely on a VPN provider. First of all, you can't really trust the VPN provider any better than you know them. Are they really a front for the NSA or Mafia? How can you tell? Can you really tell? Nope. And second of all, known VPN providers are the most interesting targets for snoops of all kinds. If you're looking for some juicy traffic to capture and analyze, you can't get any juicier than the stuff that comes out of a VPN endpoint.

So build your own VPN. This can be as cheap as $5/mo. Get a virtual server from your favorite hosting company (e.g. Amazon, Digital Ocean, Linode, OVH, Softlayer, Google, doesn't matter) and set it up for tunneling. SSH tunneling with socks proxy is the simplest, but there's plenty of information on setting up other software like PPTP and OpenVPN.

You're still trusting the hosting company and their ISP, but you were always trusting the hosting company and their ISP, you just didn't know who it was before.

As for what country to choose -- you'd be daft to think that your country of choice is any less invasive than the US or Canada with respect to data privacy. Just because the NSA is in the news doesn't mean they're the greatest threat.

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    I cannot fully agree with that. On commercial VPNs they often have common pool of IPs for all customers and with essentially big userbase it would be quite cumbersome to trace your personal activity (among others) even if they make logs. Own server is a dead and, and all traces lead to you.
    – Suncatcher
    Feb 14, 2017 at 21:27

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