Confused of by advertisement and people praising VPN services, but then hearing from tech people trashing VPN…
What do you guys think?
I use a VPN 24/365 to hide as much info as possible from my ISP. I use the VPN’s DNS, inside the tunnel. And I use HTTPS. I use a generic VPN client, not the custom client from the VPN company.
So, my ISP knows my real name, home postal address, home IP address, phone number, payment info. My VPN doesn’t know any of my ID, knows my home IP address, and sees what sites I access. This is compartmentalization.
I don’t trust either ISP or VPN, but splitting the data between them is better than letting the ISP see all of it.
The VPN I use gives me additional features that all VPNs give, such as location-changing, and mixing my traffic with that of thousands of other users. The particular VPN I use also does ad-blocking and malware-site-blocking.
Yes, using a VPN is a good thing to do.
To answer your question, in an ideal digital world every connection would be private and every communication encrypted, just not everyone is up to speed with that yet.
VPN as a technology can offer powerful capabilities. The issue though lies with user implantation and the VPN provider.
-Many people use them poorly and make themselves vulnerable to data correlation.
-The large majority of the mainstream VPN providers are owned by shady and conspicuous companies that make false claims about their service.
However they’re about 2 or 3 providers in my opinion that offer strong privacy and even anonymity.
Throughly vet the VPN provider before choosing their service.
-Reputation, transparency, audits.
-Strong encryption protocols
-Jurisdiction
-Server architecture
-No logging
-Payment options
…ect
Drop in at your local coffee shop and want to use WiFi…. wrap it.
If you’re worried about mass surveillance, you should actually consider it your duty to support high quality VPN services committed to correctly securing and protecting private data. It is absolutely worth it in the long run if that is a genuine concern. But technology is an ongoing battle of coding through “guarantees” and “100%” anything. There is always the possibility that a fresh mind will come along and crack the uncrackable. There is way more to this than just investing in a VPN to encrypt your IP address, there are other layers of knowledge and understanding that need to be applied as well.
These mainstream services do have a tendency to advertise themselves as “1-click full privacy” as if it could ever be that easy. They do that because explaining to the average consumer the full scope of what’s necessary to truly protect themselves online, has a tendency to overwhelm them, leading them to reject VPNs entirely and surrender to lack of privacy and mass surveillance, as if that is a better option than adjusting to mild sacrifices in perceived convenience. There is a great irony in how this mentality has been reflected by the anti-mask anti-vax movement.
Some may come along and argue against my point, but in my personal opinion the answer is yes, investing in VPN is worth it in regards to your private information, and the growing issue of mass surveillance. But there is more research to be done if you want to be truly protected. Never stop learning.
trends are the other way