Or does it matter?
Protecting your identity against who? If it’s against the service provider, there’d be no point as they’d already know who you are with you logging in.
Your connections to the banks, email providers, and other services would already have security in place and are probably already encrypted thru the HTTPS.
If there’s somebody snooping while you’re making one of this HTTPS connection, they might be able to tell the URL domain you’re accessing, but nothing more.
On the other hand, if the VPN provider you’re using turned out to be malicious, they’re be able to get every network traffic that passes thru them.
What attack are you trying to protect yourself against?
In general no. It does not make sense.
You hide your actual IP from your bank. You hide that you connect to your bank from your ISP. Neither is very interesting to anyone trying to harm you.
I have really started to use VPNs on all of my internet traffic more as an FU to trackers and advertisers. I don’t do anything illegal or malicious, I’m just tired of being the product on every site I visit, every click I make.
I know it doesn’t make me completely invisible. But at least I try to make it harder on them.
IMO, VPNs are a waste of money unless you plan on pirating content or changing your location on your device to access say better Netflix’s shows. Other than that, there are already security features built in to your phone and you don’t need a VPN. It’s unnecessary. Just don’t do any sketchy stuff on it.
Blanket statements like this are not helpful. VPNs have a utility, for example, if you don’t want your ISP to know what bank you use because this little nugget of data is valuable to advertisers.
VPNs without a dedicated IP (like what you want to bypass Netflix geo fencing) only works for obfuscating, not protecting.
I guess you have a point. I just never used them. Never had a problem without them, and officiated their use in my understanding and decided they aren’t necessary. They are necessary for the reasons I described. The question is how much risk am I taking without a VPN, as I never got hacked. I also never use antivirus. Scan my PC with an AI Agent to search for malware weekly and never had a problem in the past several years atleast. I never had a virus, never had my info stolen or identity. But that is not necessarily a reason not to protect yourself, I get it. I just don’t want the extra bill, even if they are pretty cheap these days.
While it doesn’t address your security concerns, using a VPN does allow you to circumvent resolution restrictions on certain mobile plans (i.e. streaming limited to 720p)
I’ve had this before. It won’t steam 1080p then I turn on the VPN and it loads 4k instantly.
You have to identify yourself to the bank, so I’d say using a VPN for banking is actually a bad idea because now you’re attaching your identity to the VPN traffic.
I’ve seen reports that some banks block connections from known VPNs.
