alt Hacker NewsIs there any real-life situation in which this matters, though?
If you're picking a country so you can access a Netflix show that geolimits to that country, but Netflix is also using this same faulty list... then you still get to watch your show.
If you're picking a country for latency reasons, you're still getting a real location "close enough". Plus latency is affected by tons of things such as VPN server saturation, so exact geography isn't always what matters most anyways.
And if your main interest is privacy from your ISP or local WiFi network, then any location will do.
I'm trying to think if there's ever a legal reason why e.g. a political dissident would need to control the precise country their traffic exited from, but I'm struggling. If you need to make sure a particular government can't de-anonymize your traffic, it seems like the legal domicile of the VPN provider is what matters most, and whether the government you're worried about has subpoena power over them. Not where the exit node is.
Am I missing anything?
I mean, obviously truth in advertising is important. I'm just wondering if there's any actual harm here, or if this is ultimately nothing more than a curiosity.
Replies
> Is there any real-life situation in which this matters, though?
You’d be shocked at the number of people in regulated industries that thinks a VPN inherently makes them more secure. If you think your traffic exits in the US and it exits in Canada — or really anywhere that isn’t the US — that can cause problems with compliance, and possibly data domicile promises made to clients and regulators.
At minimum, not being able to rely on the provider that you are routing your client’s data through is a big deal.
Yes. Let’s take an extreme example: you think you exit in Japan, but you’re actually exiting in China. This means your traffic will be analyzed and censored by China.
The routers don’t care about where the provider says the IP comes from. If the packet travels through the router, it gets processed. So it very much matters if you do things that are legal in one country, but might not be in another. You know, one of the main reasons for using VPNs.
Attempting to use a VPN location in Somalia and actually getting routed to an exit in Paris or London is not what I would consider "close enough". That's off by 3000 miles. That's like claiming to be in the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil while being in Montreal, Canada. And apparently 28% of locations are off by at least this much
And if I do it for privacy, the actual exit location seems very relevant. Even if I trust the VPN provider to keep my data safe (which for the record I wouldn't with the majority of this list), I still have to consider what happens to the data on either end of the VPN connection. I'm willing to bet money that any VPN data exiting in London is monitored by GCHQ, while an exit in Russia probably wouldn't be in direct view of NSA and GCHQ