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Comment by M_Grey | Hacker News Reader

The counter-arguments:

A VPN that sells your information and eventually, inevitably is caught, will lose their entire business. Meanwhile they can make a perfectly good profit just... providing the desired service. There are also people who take the time to investigate these various services, and you can do some work to find one that meets standards you deem to be acceptable.

There isn't going to be a perfect solution here, but the issues with VPN's are really not the issues you raise. My concerns are: Google and other major sites endlessly pestering VPN users with CAPTCHA requests, or the government actually making them illegal. Your concerns are largely answered by researching which product you're willing to buy, not unlike all other similar decisions in life.

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This argument, applied to any industry, is so tired by now.

Yes, a VPN company caught selling info would crash and burn. The invisible hand would ensure this, etc etc. But only if they got caught, and even then it's not like there would be any actual legal punishment (outside of a lawsuit if they were contractually obligated to not sell the info, I guess). And if selling that info meant double the profits, I doubt the owners who were willing to lie to their customers would feel all that bad or embarrassed. They'd probably also be shameless enough to re-brand.

And all that is ignoring the fact that with VPNs privacy becomes a privilege only to people who can a.) afford it and b.) understand how to use it. And finding a VPN that won't sell your info on the side requires the time and know-how to research it, not to mention even considering that a VPN might sell your info requires interacting with news orgs or people who might bring this concept up.

Chalk this up as another "HN readers don't realize most people don't read HN", color me surprised.

Except that those "most people" are the ones who are directly responsible for electing the current crop of leaders who have put us in this position, so I'm running a bit low on universal love and compassion, sue me. Moreover this is, as others have pointed out, not a new loss of privacy, just a new monetization of the existing loss of privacy.

So yes, there are better solutions involving the law, but unfortunately the innocent lambs you're defending are the ones calling us nerds and buying IoT junk!

Those "most people" also elected the bunch that put the law there in the first place. But it wasn't a campaign issue for either side, so it seems silly to bring up. This is a consumer protection / rights issue and the best way to handle it is clearly through policy, the free market won't do well for the vast majority of people especially in the ISP industry.

Their competitors that sell info will be cheaper, so there's a good chance that the trustworthy ones will be pushed out of business. Then you're left with only cheaters, but you won't know that at the time. You'll only find out that everyone is cheating long after your info has been sold.

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