I was thinking of this recently because I might set one up. Having your own hosted instance would mean you don’t have to place trust in anyone but yourself. But, the question I have surrounds this:
If you only are hosting your own one instance of a VPN, will using this end node have any differences in the effects of privacy and masking to using no VPN?
To me this seems like it would still be uniquely identifiable and just an extension of the same amount of privacy you already have. It feels like it would just be the same thing happening, but instead the server’s IP is the one being tracked. And since you are the only one using it, you too. Please let me know if I am wrong about anything or any proposed different approaches to the problem. 
Good question. First let’s make a distinction between privacy and anonymity. Private = encrypted = confidential. You can be known as a sender of a message but the message itself is secret and only you can read it.
Anonymous = unknown sender/receiver but not necessarily private and confidential.
A VPN can provide both or just one. First most web traffic is already encrypted with HTTPS. So at best without a VPN your ISP or anyone on your LAN can see domains. Not content. They know what sites you visit but can’t see plain text content. Adding a VPN creates an encrypted tunnel to the VPN server. The VPN server acts like a proxy and forwards traffic to it’s destination. So if you connect to a VPN server hosted by a 3rd party then your ISP can see the IP of the VPN server but nothing else. The VPN server can keep logs tho and they basically get the snoop on your traffic since you’ve given them the trust.
Self hosted VPNs are those where you host the VPN server. So you know for certain if you keep logs or not. This is by far the best way to go but also limiting. If you want a VPN for pirating copyright content then the ISP will send the notices to the address the VPN server is hosted from. So if that is your home then you’ve got privacy but no anonymity. Make sense? If you’re away from your home network and want to access files on your local LAN remotely and securely then a VPN is a great use case for that. But I wouldn’t be pirating movies. 
You can also rent a VPS or host OpenVPN in AWS. That gives some level of anonymity because you can pick a server located in Switzerland for example but if you want many server locations to choose from then you’d have to rend a VPS for each geographic location which can get expensive.
Apps, websites and services that use IP based location tracking will not be able to tell when you come and go from your home.
Where would you host it? At home or on a rented server?
If you host it at home, your public IP will be the same whether or not you use a VPN.
If you host it elsewhere, now you’re trusting the server provider with your data. They have control over the server, how do you know they’re not snooping?
That last point is ultimately the biggest privacy issue with signing up with third-party VPN services by the way. You’re tunneling your traffic through a server controlled by someone else. Do you trust that VPN provider enough to send ALL your traffic, sensitive or otherwise through them?
The main advantage of running my own vpn for me has been dns based ad blocking with pihole and being able to adjust the settings on the server for bad internet connections.
VPNs provide privacy, not anonymity.
AGREE!
By itself, a VPN cannot grant anonymity. A VPN won’t give you any more anonymity than you get from getting a different IP address from your ISP.
This. I’m really tired of the term VPN being thrown around so loosely. A VPN isn’t an anonymizer, it’s a secure connection between you and another network.
Ahhhh so it does actually fix the ISP problem! The web request will of course be masked between you and your VPN which would then prevent the ISP from seeing them. Totally forgot about that. Thankyou for the insight with this. I am just thinking about IP tracking and trying to do all I can on all fronts to combat tracking of the big tech companies. I guess it doesn’t do all that much on that front, but can bring about many benefits for encrypting traffic until it’s out of the immediate local network.
Buy a VPN with crypto (make sure not to leave a trail to your wallet) and use a clean e-mail to sign up. Yes the provider knows your true IP but it is miles better to lay your eggs in a basket that is incentivised and lives off “selling privacy/anonymity”. If you use TOR without a VPN, your ISP (a government approved business) will flag you and you will be subject to more suspicion.
As someone still trying to get VPNs, this was very helpful, thank you
Thankyou for the insight; many interesting points. I understand now that it solves some issues, like encrypting your data until it’s outside your network/ISP/etc. But I also do understand more of the limitations. Interesting debacle!
Can I say as such:
VPN is privacy. Your neighbour knows you are staying in the house but have no idea what are you doing inside.
Anonymity is able to see how messy the house is in but don’t know who did it.
Thanks for this. So even if you’re using own hosted VPN your ISP can still see the traffic, such as when you’re downloading torrents?
It would be hosted on a rented server. The snooping could maybe be done, but at least all requests could be encrypted and no data be looked into. However aligning incoming IP with outgoing endpoint is definitely something to think about which bigger VPN’s probable solve a little bit. My biggest issue with using other VPN’s is as your last point, trust.
But if we tell people that then all the youtube viewers won’t sign up for !!!
proof for your last claim?
Anonymity is your neighbor knows somebody lives at your house but doesn’t know who you are.
Makes me wonder what the point in hosting one is if your ISP is the only one who can see your activity to begin with
Common sense. You must be naive to think using TOR in broad daylight is going unnoticed.
