Technology

Spends most of article telling you why they probably aren’t necessary.

Ends with 4 examples why they’re useful, which are the main reasons they’re used to begin with.

The title should be "You should understand what a VPN is for, before using one."

Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.

If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.

As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else's ISP making that info worthless.

If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you're technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.

Well, that article was a hot mess.

I appreciate the authors effort and they are correct about lack of "what is VPN" articles that are not written by VPN-vendors in marketing purpose. But I'm not sure if this was it.

Writing an article meant to "debunk" misconceptions and getting two core concepts, Security and Privacy mixed up right from the start wasn't very good.

A lot of time was spent on explaining HTTPS and how it somehow magically makes you and your data secure on the Internet and it completely missed to mention who the potential threat actors thwarted by HTTPS are?

Could have probably used a chapter on how actual threats (both security and privacy) work and how don't have much to do with the level of encryption your TCP/IP connection happens to encapsulate.

The last chapter with the first 3 bullets was pretty good though. That could have just been the whole article and it would have been alright.

Oh well. Attempt was made.

When to use a VPN

VPNs are not magical fixes for privacy and security on the internet. However, there are some specific situations where they are useful tools.

Network blocks and internet censorship. VPNs can help you access sites and services that are restricted by your local network or government. That's why downloads of VPN apps in Russia skyrocketed in 2022, after the country's invasion of Ukraine and more services became blocked. The same trend happened in Virginia and other U.S. states after they passed laws requiring photo identification for adult websites.

Piracy. Internet service providers can sometimes detect when you are pirating movies, TV shows, music, or other media and send you angry letters. You can avoid that entirely by using a VPN when you download or torrent copyrighted material. Do what you want 'cause a pirate is free... but use a VPN.

Region-locked content. This is a popular selling point for VPN companies that is actually true: VPNs can help you access online content that is officially restricted to a certain region. Switching your VPN server to a different country can change what movies and shows are available through Netflix, and UK-based VPN servers are frequently used to access BBC iPlayer content in other countries. However, this is not always reliable, as service providers will usually detect VPN servers after a while and block them.

Accessing your home network. Setting up a VPN server at home is one way to access devices on your home network (such as self-hosted security cameras, media servers, and remote desktop) without opening up more of your network to the rest of the internet.

There are other more niche use cases for VPNs, but those are the most popular ones that aren't completely made up.

I know exactly how litigious Funimation is. I absolutely need a VPN. :D

Gonna have to disagree here. The article's main point seems to be "privacy is impossible" because there are other ways to track you that it assumes you're not accounting for:

It's true that your IP address is your main identifier on the internet. However, there are many other identifiers that are used for tracking your activity across the internet. Most advertising networks, including Google Ads, primarily use cross-site cookies (eventually to be replaced by the Privacy Sandbox) to keep track of you across the web. Google uses an advertising ID for the same purpose on Android devices, and Apple has a similar ID for iPhone and iPad devices. VPNs do not change any of those identifiers.

There are also other browser features that can be used for tracking you across the web, such as the User Agent and HTML5 element, in a process called fingerprinting. Web browsers have been reigning in this behavior over the past few years.

These are all true but there are also ways to circumvent (to some degree) all of those other tracking methods and doing so in conjunction with a VPN will give you a more private and secure browsing experience.

Clearly whoever wrote this has not tried torrenting popular content 🤨

I like VPNs because you get a colorful selection of who to potentially get man in the middle attacked by.

Nevermind the government or hackers, I use a home-grown VPN to keep Comcast off my ass.

I'm not quite paranoid enough to believe that all of these anti-VPN articles are propaganda sponsored by people who want to make mass surveillance easier, but when it's from someone whose other recent posts include one titled "Youtube ads aren't actually that bad" and two explaining why Google's Manifest V3 is great, I'm at least going to suspect it as a possibility.

Another good use for VPN is to counter dynamic pricing. My wife visited a website some time ago to request the price for a ticket. When she visited the website a second time the price had increased considerably. However when visiting the price with VPN it was the original price again. It saved her a lot of money.

IVPN created an awesome website called doineedavpn.com where they honestly and objectively answer that question. It's one of the reasons why I like IVPN as a VPN provider, they are honest and don't hide anything from their customers. Also their apps are open source and they support anonymous signup.