Should I use a VPN? And if so, how?

Privacy Questions
1

So I’m running mullvad VPN on the iPhone and was curious, if necessarily. Mostly I just wanted to

  1. not let provider know what I do browsing
  2. hide my IP from websites and trackers
  3. have some dns filtering, tho I also run adguard pro (with dns disabled)

was curious if I could save up some battery life with using other means, such as private relay, vpn set up on a router, custom dns instead of relying on vpn’s and not using vpn altogether for my casual browsing consisting mostly of libreddit and logged in twitter from a webapp. Ty

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I wouldn’t use a VPN on an iPhone since they are known to have leaked for many years.

not let provider know what I do browsing

Do you mean your ISP or your VPN? Your VPN provider will see all of your traffic so you must trust them. Do you trust Mullvad more than your ISP? Even if you did, VPNs are vulnerable to traffic analysis in which an ISP can determine the websites you visit even with the encryption.

A VPN will hide your IP address but that alone isn’t enough to hide your location. You must also not give any websites permission to access your location.

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3

Three problems

  1. You VPN provider will know all of your traffic.
  2. The IP is just one of many informations a website can have, as he also can identify you with browser version/language, OS, etc. Btw, if you have your browser in your language, for instance in french, and you have an IP which is from Netherlands, lol, you will just stand out more.
  3. I’m not sure if it is what you ask, but please just use the DNS filtering included with your VPN provider. That way, you reduce the number of entitites to trust.

Using a VPN on a router (afaik) is completely useless, bc you stick with the same IP, and you defeat the purpose of a VPN imho.

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4

I think that some good information has already been provided to the OP in this thread, so I’ll just leave a few more links to our own resources, as well as a third-party resource by the people being IVPN (which is one of our recommended VPN providers).

The VPN providers we recommend, as well as the criteria we use to determine which ones we should recommend:

Our VPN overview page that talks about when VPNs are useful, and when they’re not, among other things:

And finally, “Do I need a VPN?” by IVPN:

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