Aggregate data doesn’t mean no client side data. It’s possible they’re collecting aggregate level client data too. They could go further and collect data on individuals that is not identifiable or useful to law enforcement in any way. I can think of a few ways to get anonymous usage data that allows you to improve your service while protecting your users. I don’t know their scheme but they clearly don’t need overly invasive forms of analytics as they have a solid service.
Quality of service is usually only useful with aggregate data which is worthless for prosecuting an individual.
Not OP, but I just use ZeroTier for this since it’s dead simple to setup and free. I’m sure there’s some 100% self-hosted solutions, but it’s worked for me without issue.
Not the person you’re replying to, but I bought an Optiplex 5050 with an i7-7700 for $75 to use as a server because an RPi 5 is more expensive and way less powerful. It even has a CD drive.
Surprisingly, Remarkable tablets, despite not being open source, you can do just about anything with. They allow root SSH access and the backend is a heavily stripped down version of Linux.
I’ve been writing an application to allow customizing splash screens over SSH/SFTP and it’s actually been super easy to work with. The “jailbreak” scene is also super active, and the company has gone the opposite direction of most. They retroactively removed the need for a subscription to cloud sync on all devices, and seem to very much embrace the ridiculous things people have done with their tablets.
The device is also no nonsense and does exactly what it’s designed to do extremely well and no more. No ads, no bloat, no constant internet connection. You could never connect the thing to the internet if you really wanted. Honestly one of the few devices I’ve bought in recent memory that I feel like I wholely own.
Two big downsides are no Bluetooth, and you need a modified hardware device to unbrick the device if you fuck up (jumping type C pins to put the device into recovery). Overall really solid and would recommend.
I did a lot of research a few years ago and settled on ProtonVPN. I won’t say anything authoritative regarding privacy as I haven’t done any recent research, but I’ve been very happy with the service so far.
I run a seedbox with all the traffic from qBittorrent tunneled through ProtonVPN and I’ve gotten up to 200 Mbps down through a few very healthy torrents before, and on dedicated speed tests I can pull down ~250 Mbps on my gigabit service. I’ve also never had it go down despite using the exact same server 24/7.
Their documentation is also amazing and they generate connection configs for Wireguard and OpenVPN on their website using provided parameters making it dead simple to get started.
I never open any ports to the open Internet other than the two my friend client uses.
For remote access I use a P2P VPN called ZeroTier leaving it always running on the Pi, and switching it on for the remote device when needed. It’s free for up to like 50 users and is very powerful, but dead simple.
I usually just run a ZeroTier client on my Pi connected to a private P2P network to solve this issue, and then have ProtonVPN over Wireguard for all internet traffic in and out of the Pi.
I have a Pi 3B+ I run qBittorrent, Plex, ProtonVPN through Wireguard, and a Samba share on and have had 0 issues. It’s connected to a 2 TB external SSD which is where the Plex media library lives and coincidentally where qBittorrent downloads to by default wink wink. I also have a P2P VPN called ZeroTier that allows me to securely connect to the Pi from anywhere. You should be golden with a Pi 4.
I’ve had zero issues even transcoding 4k BluRay content, but it required adding active cooling to prevent the Pi from overheating. Thankfully you can get a tiny heatsink and fan for under $10.
Edit: Accidentally said RPi 5 which didn’t exist… Fixed.
Yes? I work in the identified healthcare data space, but work close to people in the unidentified space and even something as personal as health data can be obfuscated in such a way it’s impossible to trace back to an individual. Not to mention whatever they’re logging is surely many orders of magnitude less identifiable. They also have an entire page dedicated to answering these types of questions and concerns.