@ cubot
where did you hear me shout? I just WROTE my concerns. I think you are the one who is a bit aggressive here.
And I know that Opera VPN is only browser based not a systemwide VPN.
@ leocg and joshl
Please excuse me. You were right. I indeed found a old cookie which Ccleaner AUTOMATICALLY had excluded. I deleted it.
And also I got a very competent and detailed answer from Mr. Wilton-Jones from the Opera support.
I paste it here for everyone who has questions about Opera VPN:
Hi,
Thanks for your mail.
Google probably recognises you because you visited the Google site
before enabling the VPN, and it set a cookie to use for identification.
You can clear or disable cookies in the settings. You can also start a
private tab and enable VPN in it, so that none of your old cookies will
be used.
Note that Google (and other websites) may also recognise your browser's
language setting. For example, if your browser language is set to
German, and you enable VPN with your location set to Canada, websites
may still give you German versions of their sites or German search
results, just because of your browser's language setting - not because
they have actually recognised you. If you care about this (it has no
privacy implications, and is actually useful to have websites work in
your chosen languages) you can change your browser language in the
settings. Opera menu - Settings - Browser - Languages - Specify your
preferred languages for webpages.
your browser VPN generates a STATIC (!) Device-ID which can be used for tracking
The Device-ID cannot be seen by websites. It is used only by the
SurfEasy VPN server, eg. so that it can see that it granted permission
for your browser to use the VPN. If you wanted to, you can clear theDevice-ID (it will generate a new one next time you use the VPN) using
Opera menu - More tools - Clear browsing data - Third party services
data. (Note that this will make it very slightly slower when
reconnecting to the VPN, since it will need to generate the new ID.) You
can see more about how SurfEasy uses the subscriber ID in their privacy
policy here:
https://www.surfeasy.com/privacy_policy/
Hope this clears things up for you.
--
Tarquin Wilton-Jones
Security Team
Opera Software