Pick a cloud provider you trust. I was thinking of moving from Digital Ocean (US) to Hetzner (German) and setting my own VPN up through a normal server.

I've pondered this before, but I don't see much advantage in having my traffic which currently comes from many IP addresses as I roam about the world, many of them shared and constantly changing, all come from one IP address that is absolutely only me.

Plus browsing the web from a hosting provider is a worse web; you'll get more sites rejecting you or putting you through bad CAPTCHAs all the time because the same service you can rent a server from, so can all the spammers and scrapers and other bad actors, so you're pretty likely to end up in an IP space with bad reputation.

If anyone can argue me out of this position, go nuts. I want this to work and do something useful, I just can't convince myself it does even with that bias.

This worse web is literally Google bullying you unless you tell them everything about who you are.

No, that's a different web. I live in the "google bullying" web between my combination of using Firefox + uMatrix on desktop, Brave on Android, and DuckDuckGo as my search engine. Google gets very little of my desktop info and fragmentary mobile use only. I do a few extra CAPTCHAs but it's not too bad.

The "I think you're a bad actor" web is much worse. Ask Tor users.

Sorry, I confused the two. I'm out here using Tor for my privacy (good kid; didn't do nuffin').

If you're in the US, how exactly does moving from a US host to a German host make you more secure?

At least there are a few shreds of controls remaining on US agency surveillance of US persons using US networks.

But there are absolutely zero controls on monitoring networks beyond US borders, so it's open season for non-US hosts.

>If you're in the US,

not just US location or even US services .. it's hard to be secure when we know that the US gov is reading and storing everythign they can.

In comparison -- the EU is not. The EU has the opposite approach and takes data privacy very seriously. This is backed up with effective legislation.

Just because the host is in the EU doesn't prevent the US from monitoring it.

EU hosts are almost certainly monitored even more by US agencies than US hosts.

GDPR doesn't fix any of this.

"Europe furious, 'shocked' by report of U.S. spying"

https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/30/world/europe/eu-nsa/index.htm...

Why are public cloud providers more trustworthy than VPN providers? Some VPN providers are sketchy but not all of them.

It's not that they're more trustworthy it's that you have more control. They could be feeding traffic to the NSA as well but you can encrypt it yourself -- with VPN services like Nord you're relying on other people to do that for you but often VPN services can offer convenience services like country switching etc but if security is what you're after then cloud providers and setting up your own VPN seems like a more reliable alternative.

To the people looking to setup a simple http proxy in three steps:

1. Set up a server instance who's IP you know and have configured ssh.

2. In Browser: Manual SOCKS Proxy: 127.0.0.1: your_chosen_port

3. In terminal: ssh -i ssh_key -D your_chosen_port user@ip_address