Would you be fine with a corporation/government putting a camera in everyones house? It’s fine, since you’re not doing anything illegal, so there is really no problem. And think of how many crimes could be stopped. VPN is more about privacy than getting away with anything illegal. ISP’s collect all users browsing data and sells it off to the highest bidder. They sit between you and the services you want, so they see it all. With a VPN they know how much traffic there is, but they just know it is going through a VPN and nothing more

I use vpns primarily for circumventing geofencing

I am all up for privacy and I have tried to follow a lot of procedures for it but I have never used VPN (except TOR, which technically is not a VPN).

I actually appreciate the concept of VPN but I think how it is marketed is a bit over exaggeration. VPN is useful when you want to do something securely without the fear of being tracked, access things that are blocked by a tyrannical government, or if you want to watch shows in your region that is not available without VPN (one of the advertisement that VPN providers use). However, I do raise one of my eyebrow a bit on the scale of advertisement VPN put up. E.g. you cannot have not heard about Nord and Surfshark vpn (owned by the same company). I don’t want to complain about their service as they seem to be one of the best ones out there, and customers seem to be satisfied. But I am perplexed how aggressive their advertisement is. Also they make dubious claims in their ads that ASA (UK) had to step in. They also had their servers breached and exposes some private keys as well as some usernaems and passwords.

The same way I am perplexed about the level of advertisement of OperaGx “the gaming browser” and Honey.

I do trust ‘free vpn’ less that vpns.

Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone’s windows?

It’s completely legal for me to watch 70s pornography while drinking hard liquor and painting pentagrams on my walls and sacrificing small animals to Baal.

I’m not going to videotape it and show my grandmother.

Some things should be private. Some things should be secret. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, but simply because they’re yours and you want to keep them that way.

While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.

That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.

Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :

There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.

…

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.

Back in the days before cell phones, when landlines were ubiquitous, people in more rural areas had what they called “party lines.” It was a single telephone line shared between multiple houses. You knew which house an incoming call was for based on the ring pattern. Your neighbors could also pick up the receiver, very quietly, and listen in on your phone calls if they wanted too.

Party lines are long gone but Internet communications have their own ways of being “listened in on.” A lot of traffic transmitted over the Internet is encrypted; with TLS for instance. But, some of it isn’t. If you use traditional DNS – UDP over port 53 – everyone in between you and the DNS server can see which websites you’re visiting.

I’m not concerned about my privacy because I have something to hide. I’m concerned about it because my personal business is my business. Not anyone else’s.

Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.

I would recommend using it only in the programs that actually need it, but it will be useless, for example, for banks, stores like Amazon, and so on, if you’ve already given them all your location information. A VPN is useful for browsing the internet, messaging with family, exchanging crypto, and on social networks where you don’t share personal information. For now, we can create a separate identity while we still have the opportunity

deleted by creator

As a privacy enhancement even beyond hiding from ISPs, a VPN has value for the private person when they connect to a public Wi-Fi network and need protection from attackers.

The primary activity of a VPN, extending a private network over a public network, does not only have value for organizations, but for private people like you and me, too. E.g. you need remote access on your NAS with media or in general your devices without making them directly accessible from the internet.

But overall, it’s difficult to give you a definite answer, because it really depends on where you are from. E.g. in most European countries even bypassing geo-blocking won’t get you in trouble as they are regulating it within the EU in the first place, while on the other side in China most VPNs are prohibited in general.

I use mine to maintain control of my home server while out of the house

Yes. Absolutely. Privacy is for everyone.

You are assuming that the things legal and illegal today will continue to align with your morality. “I don’t do anything bad” only holds value while you and your governing body share beliefs.

What if tomorrow you disagree? Suddenly there would be a long history of potentially incriminating internet history associated with you. What if it’s for something you can’t even control, such as “using the internet while female” in a society that recently banned women from using the internet?

This level of paranoia shouldn’t be required yet look at the state of the world.

A VPN doesn’t just allow you to change your location. It’s a tunnel between you and someone you trust (a VPN provider). All your traffic shows up as originating from the trusted partners address do that it cannot be traced back to you. They offer this to lots of customers and if your VPN provider is worth their salt, anonymizes these interactions so that they can’t even tell people who did what.