Ask Lemmy

Just my use cases:

• Piracy
• I don't need my ISP knowing everything I do regardless of legality.
• I don't need dickhead network admins knowing everything I do on their network, regardless of legality.
• I don't need every website knowing my identity regardless of legality.
• newpipe always takin' 'bout some goddamn "sign in to confirm u no bot" and hell no I'm just gonna reroll my location and oh look that worked.

It is not about illegal. It is more of "under the radar".

• Say, you want to watch a video on youtube but it is geolocked? Start your VPN and BAM! It is not locked anymore.

• Want to tip your toes in selfhosting and Arr stack but government is grabbing torrent users by the balls? VPN will cover your back.

• Do not like your ISP to log your traffic to sell to marketers? Make them lose their minds not knowing what you do by routing traffic through VPN.

• Hate ads on Youtube? Change to Mongolia and you wont have ads on youtube anymore (uBO is actually better for that).

• Government wants your ID to visit adult content sites? VPN is on the case!

Also, as a side effect you are less likely to get hacked if you use VPN since all your activity comes from an IP address that is not associated with your device.

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.

Might be useful for self-hosting when you're away from home and don't want to open your ports up to public internet traffic. Also whistle blowing is kind of in public interest. And circumventing regional censorship. Depending on the country the latter two might not be fully legal but it's best if it stays this way. Hiding yourself from prying eyes of ISPS google and so on is also fully legal and important as you can be geolocated often to a few hundred meters without it.

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.

For me, it's when it's convenient. Opera has a VPN built in, so why not? I'm not so much worried about the government. I'm more worried about website owners.

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

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?

Privacy should be the default, not the exception.

You could be another user resisting surveillance, or another user contributing to it.

The choice is yours.

Here's a free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn

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.

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.

As a private person doing nothing illegal, is there value in having curtains on your windows ?

It's not a question of whether there are things I'd like to hide, and why I want to hide them. It's simply a natural desire to only disclose my personal affairs to specific parties for specific purposes.

Suppose I go to the pharmacy for some paracetamol and they ask to see a list of all the people I've emailed in the last 6 months, or at the supermarket I need to share my search history for the last 6 months.

There's nothing illegal or anything I would be really embarrassed about, but it would be absolutely absurd. That's the way the modern internet is built though.

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.

Yes. Personalized pricing relies on harvesting data. Don't get played. Hackers and scammers rely on getting data on you. Don't give it to them.

And everyone has something to hide. Do you have cancer? An STD? An affair? Those are all legal, but depending on the circumstances, you might get fucked if the whole town knew. Protect your data.

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

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”

It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.

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.

The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that suddenly illegal thing in the past.

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.

When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide

But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi

I currently use the TOR browser when I'm searching for things I'd rather for-profit companies didn't know, like health care information.

I have considered getting a VPN because I live in Texas, where a lot of perfectly legal content has been blocked "to protect the children," and because I know my political searches will be turned over to the government if Trump or Abbot asks for them.

If you're in the UK, suddenly being in a different country can be beneficial if you don't feel like having your face scanned or giving away your credit card details before engaging in some self-care.

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.

Some non-polotical reasons:

If you live in the US there's a better chance than not that your ISP is selling your personal data. Outside US idk, maybe still though. Either way you're putting a lot of trust in a telecom company.

Since net neutrality was removed your traffic can be throttled based on what type of traffic it is, so having it all encrypted for the first hop at least has it treated all the same.

Two political ones I haven't seen mentioned yet:

You don't actually know you don't have anything to hide. Again, assuming US, the amount of federal laws there are couldn't fit in a pickup truck if they were all printed out. And if someone's looking to make an example of you then you shouldn't make it easy for them to find a reason. My favorite example is that throwing out mail that isn't addressed to you (like junk mail for a previous tenant etc) is a felony.

You also could be falsely accused of a crime. For example, your phone gave out it's location info near a place where coincidentally an actual crime had taken place. Best to not give that information freely to everyone and have to pony up $10k for a lawyer for nothing.

I'm always using a proton vpn. As well as a hardened librewolf and default ironfox. I definitly get more captchas and there are some sites that don't load up, but I have yet found a site that blocks me that I'd turn the vpn off for.

Somethings to note though:

I have been suspended from esty after buying stuff, likely from the vpn. I appealed but nothing has really happened.

Youtube can be a pain, I no longer use google accounts and I don't bother using their captchs. I just shuffle around on my vpn until I'm no longer a bot.

Streaming; netflix is fine, though I stick to my home country normally.

I tried a couple of other with limited success, nowadays I only use netflix on my compy with a vanilla firefox

I think I tried Paramount and it wasn't working out. But it may have been because of it not available in my contry or something.

Disney was givin me a lot of trouble, but I think I did get it to work on my phone with the vpn once. (Had to restart the phone with Disney+ disabled first, the it worked.)

Honesty it's not that bad.
Also as I was writing this I was going list out my privacy set up, but I realized I think I've become meme.

Asvertising and surveillance pricing. Even if you aren’t doing anything illegal, data about your internet habits is being collected, stored, and sold in order to serve you ads and potentially affect the prices of things you spend on.

Encrypt your DNS as well, then ISP can't even see what you're searching for

https://youtu.be/xAo61IaXun8

There's value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.

Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.

Most VPNs won't even work for daily browsing as far as I'm aware. You'll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.

Personally, for generic browsing, I'm not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I'm accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they'll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.

There's also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.

Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.

And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don't think it's necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).

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

Yes, even if you trust people in positions of power with access to that data which there are tons of evidence to not do that, laws change and the people enforcing the laws change. Not using a VPN is telling your ISP and potentially thousands of advertisers and dozens of governments everything you search for, private messages if you're not using a peer to peer encrypted messaging app, and all of the meta data indicating where you are & when you sleep or are alone. Intelligence agencies run programs like those leaked (not just the US but definitely including them) and when there was little to no political backlash when those were revealed you can assume they are doing much worse now.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." - Snowden

Either everyone's data is public and transparent or nobody's is, partial selection is just asking to be used as a weapon against the people being snooped on.