HN gets regular "what VPN should I use?" questions and my answer is always the same: Algo [1]. It is designed to be simple to set up, simple to tear down, and usable with numerous cloud providers or your own Linux server.
But many (the undersigned for example) use VPNs for many other purposes:
Unencrypted WiFi (airport, hotel, etc)
Secure connectivity but provided by someone you aren't willing to trust (your employer?)
Fooling Geo-IP based restrictions (hello Netflix/BBC)
Not having your VoIP traffic mangled by a shitty carrier who's trying to extort protection money from you in the form of some "VoIP-optimized" expensive plan
Etc etc
Let me try to explain. You use a VPN to protect your connection from MiM attacks, for example if you connect to a public wifi-hotspot, or even when you are connected from home. It also gives you some privacy, because nobody can sniff your traffic, but it does not give you anonymity, well it can, but you'll not be able to verify that it does.
Sure, you hide from your ISP, but you can't verify that your VPN-provider is more trustworthy than your ISP. They might actually log everything and send it on to a third party and you'll never know. Hell, they might even be funded by the NSA...
Use Tor if you want anonymity, even though that's not 100 % sure either.
AWS will make no secondary use of customer data. The ISPs have told us they will, and the FCC gave them permission to do so. Which one will you trust? I know I would trust AWS any day over the ISPs...
Still, I think it creams every general public offering. I agree with fictioncircle above that the "anonymity" thing is a total red herring. VPNs in this application are fundamentally about creating a hack to let individuals change their Internet access from a natural monopoly situation to a strongly competitive and customer oriented market situation via virtual end point shifting. That's "it", though it's a big deal. But "anonymity" is a far, far trickier problem, requiring not just extensive infosec but also significant opsec. At a bare minimum most people would need to use something like the Tor browser, not just for the "tor" part but for the hardening they put into the browser to make it somewhat harder to get tracked anyway regardless of IP address. I think a lot of the "anonymity" marketing claims some public VPNs make verge on not merely disingenuous but outright dangerous to the extent they can create a totally false sense of security.
Pros:
- You can choose a VPS provider close to your network for better speed.
- Less likely to be blacklisted.
- No connection limits
- Not as anonymous to governments or IP-based tracking.Anyone with sigint capability is going to figure out who you are with a VPN. (i.e. Government agents)
In the real world, VPN are mostly used to download copyrighted material. They have a pretty much perfect track record in that regard. Running a cloud VPS, on the other hand, is no more secure than your ISP: they have records, and will share them when ordered to do so.
There can be a distinct difference between what is believed to be true and what's actually true.
There might very well be entities that has the information, but it's sitting on it for later use.
https://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/12/12/meet-algo-the-vpn-th...
- accessing non-encrypted stuff on an untrusted network
- firewall bypassing
- Torrenting
- IP ban bypassing (pretty popular for people writing scrapers or trolling)
Anonymous anything is garbage - many of them log and all can be logged by government agencies or datacenter owners ahead of you. Tor or similar is the best option there. Running something like Algo on your own server is pretty bad for both torrenting and IP ban bypassing as you only have a single IP and many cloud providers will accept DMCA and abuse reports.
All in all if you're looking for either torrenting or IP ban bypassing a commercial VPN solution is going to be a better bet. More IPs for cheaper and with lower risks.