Is a Tailscale exit node a good option for internet privacy and anonymity?

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I’m not a security fanatic, I’m just curious and learning and exploring my options. I’m trying to weigh my security options for internet at home. Absolute anonymity would require using Tor on a burner device from a public wifi while wearing a disguise. I’m not talking about that.

The more I read the more I realize I don’t know what I can trust. Just trying my best.

I’ve been reading about fingerprinting and the pros and cons of blending in vs randomization. Brave vs Firefox for example.

I’ve experimented with Warp, Protonvpn, Nordvpn, Expressvpn and have come to understand that the last 2 are not to be trusted, and that warp and Protonvpn are significantly different offerings.

I use dns-over-tls and dnssec on my pc and use Quad9’s IPs.

And now I was thinking: what if I deployed a Tailscale exit node on Digitalocean to hide my IP? Would that be better than using something like Protonvpn?

Digitalocean must log traffic and I’m assuming they could fork over who was using an IP address at a specific time… even easier if the IP address doesn’t change.

And if I don’t change that exit node’s IP address regularly doesn’t that defeat the purpose?! (yes, it does defeat the purpose)

Tailscale is a really awesome tool for creating one’s own private network over the internet but has anyone here used Tailscale successfully to increase their privacy/anonymity on the internet?

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Yeah, that isn’t anywhere close to anonymous because you still own the exit node and your provider (DO or most others) will be able to say what instance had what IP at any given time. A VPN service would be cheaper than a VM and less to manage.

If you still wanted to have a VM in DO as an exit node and actually have more private connectivity, you could setup the exit node connected to a VPN service. That’s a bit of hoop jumping though. I would imagine the latency could end up being kind of bad.