From what I gather, if you’re using the internet in a normal and legal manner in your everyday life, the only reason to use a VPN all the time is just out of principle (not wanting ISP to record and sell your data) or as an extra layer of security on public/unsafe networks. Is this a correct belief?
I don’t know if I can justify spending money on a VPN just for those reasons, considering I don’t pirate anything. If I need to connect to public or unsafe network, I can just connect to a free or self-hosted VPN. As for the ISP concern… what data don’t they have already?
Please let me know if I’m misunderstanding something or if my mindset is flawed.
Yeah your pretty much right. With a VPN your trading your ISP for a VPN company for who holds the data about you. Most VPNs do a good job not storing any data, but some are shady.
Most sites use HTTPS, so your ISP only sees you connect to that site, not any content or pages your accessing. If your at home just browsing the normal web, not much need for a VPN. However if you are out and about and are hopping on wifi a lot, you’ll want to protect yourself more with a VPN.
From your comment I gather you don’t fully grasp the concept of what selling your data entails and what the possible consequences are. You are the product and see no monetary gains from your information being sold.
Now consider the implications of having this data harvested by foreign governments and how easily people can be manipulated…
I just see no good reason that my ISP, which already knows too much about me, should see more of my activities. The burden is not on me to justify why I want privacy, the burden should be on them to justify why they want to take more and more of my data.
Do you even know how much the state is watching you? In Denmark all traffic are logged even when it’s illegal - the EU says. But they keep logs for 5 years i belive.
The NSA have hooked on our cable since 1997 gathering information on every Dane for 23 years. I don’t even know if a VPN. will work here - but you get paranoid.
ISP - agreed, they can’t track the sites you visit.
Government - depends on what you are up to and how determined they are to find out.
Hackers - a VPN doesn’t protect against malicious websites, malware or phishing.
IP address - useful for geo-blocking but without other measures you are probably still leaking information to the outside world and this also assumes that you have a VPN provider that really doesn’t keep logs of any sort.
Yes and the funny music and voices are great. I can honestly say when I don’t understand or recognize the product being marketed you can more appreciate the artistry.
I know people don’t like idea of being spied on but if you are doing nothing illegal then the fact that the Government is spying on you isn’t going to cause you any issues.
If you are engaged in illegal activities, then I wouldn’t be relying on any of the commercial VPN providers to protect against being caught.
Not to mention that even if you take simple privacy measures, nearly nobody you know will also take them, almost rendering your own actions useless. E.g. sharing personal info with Facebook/Google/etc.
Are you for real? They don’t have interest in terrorist or people making scams. They are interested in journalists, company secrets and government secrets.
Why the hell did NSA spied on Therma (Danish weapon factory), and all the ministeriel governance?
My problem is not with the commercial vpn providers. My problem is that the NSA can see what I do regardless of VPN.
The nothing to hide argument states that individuals have no reason to fear or oppose surveillance programs, unless they are afraid it will uncover their own illegal activities. An individual using this argument may say that an average person should not worry about government surveillance as they have “nothing to hide”.
Context is everything - the second part of my comment is the important bit when it comes to putting VPN into context and was a direct response to the idea that Governments are spying on people.
I’m in no way advocating or condoning spying on innocent individuals what I am saying that a VPN may not be the best solution for someone engaged in illegal activities as they may not offer the protection people think they do.