Why do you use a VPN?
Almost every YouTuber I see is sponsored by some type of VPN company, so it's obviously a lucrative vertical. I've been on the internet since the late 90's and still can't wrap my mind around any reason to pay for a VPN service aside from nefarious purposes.
Hoping to hear what your particular use case is to shell out that monthly fee.
The term “VPN” has become a bit overloaded. It can mean, among other things:
1) a corporate VPN you connect to in order to gain access to corporate resources. Cisco AnyConnect, OpenVPN, IPsec/L2TP are examples of this type.
2) An overlay network that allows seamless (and secure) access to systems on disparate networks. Wireguard (and thus Tailscale), ZeroTier are examples of this type.
3) A way for individuals to obscure their internet traffic by tunneling it to a VPN provider. Mullvad, PIA, Nord are examples of this type.
All of the sponsorships you see are from companies in category #3. It is my opinion that there are very few circumstances where using a VPN (#3) is useful or needed. HTTPS is ubiquitous, and browsers have various mechanisms for MitM prevention and other anti-spoofing/anti-tampering mechanisms. Taken together, these provide a high degree of protection that wasn’t necessarily as widely-deployed just a handful of years ago - a time when using a VPN was more useful.
Are there situations where using a VPN (#3) is warranted? Yes, for sure. However, these content creators who are taking sponsor money from VPN providers are doing their viewers a disservice by making them think they need a VPN. 99% of the public does not, and should not waste their money on it.
I do it to keep all my devices on the same IP subnet. Things like Syncthing and SSH "Just Work" over cellular data and McDonalds Guest Wifi as if you were on a home network. Tailscale does this really well, and they don't try to market themselves as some privacy broker. They're a plain-and-simple virtual router, and it works really well in my experience.
I was poking around a government website one day, noticed a security issue, later showed someone that vulnerability I found, this person proceeded to poke around with the website for hours (unbeknown to me) without causing any harm. A few weeks later I had the somewhat local police take a lot of my belongings and charge me with a multi felony crime. I had to pay an attorney 10s of thousands of dollars to basically have the whole thing go away. Now I have a felony arrest record that I still have pop up on background checks even 10 years later.
If I would have been using a VPN, I think the barrier would have been too high for the local police to do this on their own. According to the warrants, the local cyber investigators literally emailed comcast and they just sent them over my physical address.
With a good VPN, I think there would have been some red tape or at least a few more hurdles to complicate the situation.
This probably isn't the normal use case... but I now try to use a VPN, not because I'm doing anything nefarious or that I think it's truly anonymous. I just know it will raise the effort required to ruin my life in this same way again.
1) For work if I want to appear in a location.
2) Security if in public eifi environments.
3) Occasionally to obfuscate information if I want to download a movie or look at information, nothing interesting/nefarious but maybe you want to look at health stuff and not feel some insurance company is going to target you for ads or assume you have the condition type thing.
4) Using phone for international travel. If you use a server in your home county, turn on wifi calling and use the phone as normal for calls/text. This is how it should be.
1. Security on a public wifi.
2. Playing games on the internet with creeps who will dig through IP logs for my location. Yes, they can fingerprint my device, but device is easier to change and safer than location info.
3. Tricking Netflix into thinking I'm in Australia so I can watch Rick & Morty.
"aside from nefarious purposes"
It's not that nefarious to go around region blocks to get access to content that probably shouldn't have been blocked from you in the first place. If I'm traveling, I'm still the same person they let watch the same program at home. Or, if I want to watch Russian State controlled news, why does my government get to block it?
Although I do not use VPN for any illegal purpose, I pay for it so that
1. My internet provider would not know which sites I am visiting.
2. My sites would not know what is my actual location.
This prevents them from creating my profile and helps me protect my privacy. (I hope so).
I have made a concious decision that I would rather trust a VPN like Mullvad than my internet provider or websites.
International travel. My bank (credit union) and cell phone provider (AT&T) both block non-US access. I also use it to get around Vietnam's blocking of websites e.g. BBC.
1. My country randomly blocks websites and services. VPN is essential.
2. Have to access some sites and services with geoIP restrictions.
3. Accessing certain sites and all which I don't want to be tracked.
4. To avoid exposing my IP.
My ISP quite openly says that they spy on your traffic to monetize it. This is violently unacceptable to me, so I do my best to deny them that data.
> so it's obviously a lucrative vertical.
I don't have direct exposure but this is a highly commoditized industry with tons of competition. I imagine profits are razor thin for most providers.
UK ISPs are legally required to collect browsing data like a log of URLs visited and store them long-term. I hate being snooped on. And I need to feel free to read and research whatever I want without that being logged somewhere that is open to data brokering, profiling, or the usual data breach vulnerabilities. Finally, I’ll do anything and everything to disrupt the pervasive internet marketing machine.
“Privacy is not about having something to hide.”
Plus I torrent a bunch of stuff of course :v
I only use one for work, they're a bit careful about encrypting traffic and we have a number of resources only available on intranet.
Why? A few reasons:
- Spoofing geolocation to watch geo-locked content like BBC iPlayer (You need a UK IP for this)
- Torrenting. I don’t want to get scare letters from my ISP, so I use a VPN. I find Wireguard to be the fastest in this case.
- Protecting my network traffic on shady public Wi-Fi. Some public Wi-Fi hotspots could be malicious and could be spying or tampering with your connection.
I moved from the Netherlands (where I was born) to Germany, and I mostly use my VPN to bypass the location block on video from Dutch public broadcasting. I even still pay taxes in the Netherlands (still work there), so I feel perfectly absolved from the little moral issue anyone might have with this.
Comcast throttles traffic to sites it doesn't like and is (most likely) selling poorly deanonymized usage data. This just moves the trust problem to mullvad, but comcast sets a low enough bar that $5 a month is worth it.
From what I saw in gaming circles, VPNs are used to minimize the path between the gamer and an out of region server.
Eg, in Quake, the current e-sports tournament is being played "cross-region", people in US and EU and Oceania compete against each other. Using a VPN can shave some milliseconds off the "ping time" to the servers they're playing on (I think the rule is to use consecutively one server in each player's region).
So if the demographic of the youtubers that you mentioned is gamers, then maybe VPNs have their place, not for opsec, but for plain faster internet to remote servers.
99% access my home network remotely, but that's not really the use case of VPN services that get promoted. If I used those it would be 99% dodging geo restrictions, but I'm not motivated enough to do that.
> aside from nefarious purposes.
yup, that's the reason. and the youtubers and the vpn companies aren't even trying to hide it - they straight-up say it in the ads.
VPN stands for video pirating network, most of the time.
Either "legit" piracy so you can watch content you pay for from another country, or less legitimate piracy.
I bought a month of Mullvad because Steam could not fathom that I lived in country X (and wanted to pay with an Xian card) but was vacationing in country Y
Avoid IP-based geo-location of street address. Combine with anti-fingerprinting. Avoid restrictions from non-network-neutral ISP.
Sometimes I could not use bbc.com from my mobile. By switching to VPN, it works. I don’t know why they block bbc.com in the ISP.
Primarily, to evade blackout restrictions on MLB games. I pay for an annual pass and am still blacked out from three regional teams, regardless of where they’re playing. (And I’m lucky: some parts of Iowa have six teams blacked out, which means those folks can’t watch almost half of the league play at any given time.)
1. Sanctions. If person's country is under restrictions from the rest of the world, they need to spoof their location to be able to pay for various services.
2. Censorship.
3. An overlay network. Not really possible with most traditional commercial VPN services, but it will allow access to home devices and remote servers seamlessly.
I use WireGuard to connect to my VPSs to access services without having to expose them on an open port.
BitTorrenting pirated movies.
In China,an ordinary people need VPN to access google,youtube,twitterm,etc
I don't use a commercial one, but I have my own for ignoring filtered wifi and for getting to my home network from not-home.
Plus of course there's the company vpn for working from not-the-office.
A lot of random state portals and even mint.com are restricted from outside the USA. So while traveling I have to either remote desktop into my computer at home or just use a VPN.
You can more safely do torrenting when using a VPN in another country.
For hiding my IP for web surfing, I use Tor instead since it's free.
To manage shared social media accounts around the clock with multiple employees in different timezones.
I don't use a VPN, except ssh to connect to work.
I use it to watch BBC and Channel4 from Poland.
Because I will buy whatever you're selling if it has the word "privacy" in it.
to bypass xCloud region restrictions