What are the best locations to point my VPN to in order to defeat censorship, geo-restrictions and age-gating?
Preferably countries where English is the official language. It’s annoying that Google and others will show pages in the official language, sometimes even if you log in. E.g. Google Maps.
Assuming you are self-hosting your own VPN, Netherlands, Sweden or Switzerland for now.
In North America, I connect to NYC, Boston, Toronto, Montreal
In EU, I connect to Iceland, Ireland
In Asia, I connect to Singapore
In my experience, these places still have the most open internet so you won’t have issues you appear to be concerned about.
Consider:
I’ve noticed that DNS censorship isn’t enforced with VPNs.
For example, I read that Singapore bans porn, but if I point my VPN to Singapore, I can access PornHub. Aren’t VPN providers forced to censor this?
Anyway, this is good news because, since we have 2 kinds of censorship:
I only have to worry about the latter.
So, repeating my question, where should I point the VPN to avoid censorship, geo-restrictions and age-gating?
New York state blocks some crypto services because of some law (last time I checked) and it’s about to prevent LLMs from giving medical advice. Meta’s Llama LLM is not available in the EU. Etc.
These are examples of censorship enforced by the online service (crypto exchanges in NY, Meta/Facebook in the EU).
It looks like you are already doing some experimentation for your own use cases, so our ability to provide tailored suggestions may become increasingly limited. However, I do have an important resource from OONI that may be useful for you to reduce the amount of manual testing:
You will want to change the Test Name value to RiseupVPN Test first, then select a country of your choosing to see what websites are allowed or blocked based on the test suite. If there are no results, you can probe from that location using the VPN’s geographical IP address with OONI Probe and allow the crawling process in the background with your device(s) until the test suite(s) complete.
So far, Canada doesn’t have age-gating, the internet is fairly open and free.
I don’t expect that to change even though some of our politicians want to bring in anti-privacy laws. Any that pass will likely get overturned by the courts as we have a constitutionally protected right to privacy.
It’s a charter, no? Not a constitution. It doesn’t stem from a founding document.
That’s the phrasing I’ve read from a few different sources.
It could be the Charter. I’m no expert.
Regardless, changes that take away our privacy are frequently fought in court and overturned.
It’s in the constitution? Really?!
According to David Fraser, Canadian privacy lawyer, yes.
“Within our constitution, provinces have exclusive jurisdiction to legislate over what’s called “property and civil rights,” and this generally includes privacy. And so the provincial governments have exclusive jurisdiction over privacy when it’s a matter of property or civil rights. The federal government has jurisdiction over something called “general trade and commerce,” which is actually less general than you might think it is. And the federal parliament also has jurisdiction over federal works, undertakings, or businesses. Those are telecommunications companies, federally chartered banks, airlines, inter-provincial works, and things like that.”
I also haven’t read the entire blog post, yet. It’s on today’s to do list.
I just found that Mullvad blocks Russia Today. I guess it’s for compliance reasons since Mullvad it’s in Sweden, member of the EU.
I’m not particularly interested in Russia Today or PornHub, but I want to be the one making the decision, not the government of the EU or Singapore.
I just want a good default to point my VPN to.
I guess I need two things to avoid all censorship:
Does this combination exist?
The OONI tool helps with testing the censorship in your network, but the site doesn’t tell you where to point the VPN for zero or little censorship.
Works for me, I just checked.
The issue is that even if the combination exists now, it may not exist later. My post from earlier in this topic may already be outdated because censorship comes and goes due to live political activity across the world. Instead of attempting to avoid all forms of censorship, it would be more prudent to invert your criteria and determine what resources you need access to instead.
I wouldn’t take anything for granted though.
For example in the US, the Fourth Amendment’s is supposed to protect against “unreasonable searches and seizures” and applies to the federal government and its surveillance activities—including the use of camera. But then there is a loop-hole with surveillance via flock: DeFlock
I never do. Even with stronger privacy laws, a fair amount of our data travels internationally.