Hello there! Im looking for increased privacy when it comes to my network connections. So far I know of TOR as an almost absolute bastion of security, but how do I ensure the remaining network traffic is encrypted and private? I know of signal for communication, and I’m aware of VPN’s. However I’m not sure whether to trust most providers regarding government interference as their software often isn’t open source. Is there a federated VPN of sorts, similar to how lemmy and other fediverse apps work?
Lots of good responses in here already. Any VPN that is reliant on the use of others resources, federated or not, will require some level of trust.
You can “roll your own” and spin up a personal VPN that you host yourself that may remove some of the trust concerns, but if you aren’t building it from scratch or don’t audit any source code you use from others, whether foss or not, you are right back to the issue of trust.
Everything has a tradeoff, just like people have pointed out about Tor in this thread.
My advice is to try to balance your needs and concerns by doing research and ask around until you can narrow things down to specific products or services and then dig in anf ask pointed questions about them until you reach a level of comfort and trust that satisfies you.