Data brokers sell access to the backbone of the internet

What blows my mind is the number of people signing up for these &quot;VPN&quot; services thinking it&#x27;s secure. Time and time again we&#x27;ve found that they are logging and if they aren&#x27;t it&#x27;s logged at the flow point (as linked in this article).<p>I&#x27;m fine with VPN to evade restrictions or whatever purpose you want, but stop pretending it&#x27;s all that different.<p>I can say though for a fact that a few of the largest security companies have been paying for strategic access to netflow in the us for years. The reality is there are good arguments pro and against.. and that doesn&#x27;t even account for any &quot;netflow&quot; visibility US and Foreign Agencies may have.<p>We really have to determine what we want to be standard for privacy and what advancements we&#x27;re willing to give up in exchange.

This is nothing new in terms of technology, ISPs have a legitimate reason to want to analyze traffic in that context. There is a fairly competitive market for software that ties it all together with DNS monitoring and metadata done through internet scans (Kentic, Deepfield).<p>The fact that ISPs are monetizing it and letting this data out of their control is utterly terrifying, and in the United States, specifically permitted by law.

Why is it not illegal to sell this type of data everywhere?

Can someone explain to me why anyone would use a consumer VPN versus SSH tunneling through to a nation with secure data privacy laws if you know what you&#x27;re doing, other than convenience or the number of countries you can connect to for Netflix purposes maybe?

What&#x27;s the next step to protect against traffic analysis? Are there any VPN providers that provide stochastic masking to defeat traffic analysis? Is TOR working on mitigations? A quick search turns up <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.torproject.org&#x2F;new-low-cost-traffic-analysis-attacks-mitigations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.torproject.org&#x2F;new-low-cost-traffic-analysis-at...</a>, which discusses the use of fixed-size padding in TOR protocol headers, but it&#x27;s mostly focused on traffic analysis using then-commercially available data sources (for example, Real Time Bidding logs &amp; DNS queries), and considers full netflow data a &quot;high-effort&quot; attack available only to &quot;intelligence agencies&quot;. It seems like this may need to be reassessed.<p>EDIT: looks like this is addressed to some extent in the FAQ for Tor <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2019.www.torproject.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;faq.html.en#SendPadding" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;2019.www.torproject.org&#x2F;docs&#x2F;faq.html.en#SendPadding</a>.

I&#x27;m still not sure how this compromises VPN use. ISP routes the connection so of course they can see when I use my VPN. From there I would assume the VPN works as a mixer and handles multiple connections through the same exit point, so you couldn&#x27;t tell my traffic from another users. Is that not the case?

Worldwide governments are starting to seek backdoors&#x2F;monitoring into everything.<p>It&#x27;s only a matter of time before either hardware or OS creators are all compelled.

link to original article <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;jg84yy&#x2F;data-brokers-netflow-data-team-cymru" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;jg84yy&#x2F;data-brokers-netflow-...</a>

Is there actually any contract here? Is there even an implied contract or obligations to privacy? I&#x27;m pretty sure that it&#x27;s different for transit compared to edge.

Could this be used to de-anonymize Tor users?