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Comment by josho | Hacker News Reader

The only use case I know of for a vpn service is to hide illegal torrenting from your isp. Why else do people route all of their traffic to a third party?

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Could you really not have thought about this a bit harder? I do think that anyone here should generally just get a cheap tier VPS (or use their own existing VPS or colo or whatever depending) and run a VPN for themselves via algo or similar vs a public commercial VPN service offering, but the point of doing so isn't that complicated. Individual->Internet mediating VPNs are about shifting your effective general WAN traffic entry point from the Internet edge (the local ISP, which for many of us amounts to a single monopoly provider or a public WAN point which is also not at all trustworthy) towards the Internet core backbone, where there is extremely robust competition and in turn customer responsiveness. It's an economic hack. There are many ways my ISP might be tempted to not work on my behalf, be it active (monitoring traffic for their own advertising benefits) or merely through laziness (not putting up any resistance against even warrantless mass surveillance requests), because I have nowhere else to go and they know it.

Whereas OVH/DigitalOcean/Linode/Scaleway/Amazon/Google/whomever all have much stronger incentives to put their customers first and foremost. In terms of business model (due to how utterly trivially I could rip down a VPS and set of containers/services at any one of them and set up something identical at any other at any time) they're much more closely aligned with customer interests.

It has nothing to do with any illegal behavior per se (at least in the USA, in many countries "illegal behavior" may encompass things we consider basic rights), it has to do with economic alignment and additional privacy/security at a cheap price.

Right now, in America, your browsing history is basically for sale by your ISPs. That it may not be actively happening right now is coincidental - it is an impending certainty.

If you are okay with that, godspeed, but I think you would have to be deranged or clueless (or both) to be okay with the idea that mega-conglomerates can sell your personal browsing history to the highest bidder.

There are myriad other legitimate concerns, but this alone makes the whole debate something of a non-starter in my opinion.

My ISP and their shady pals would be like "this one likes free standard-def pr0n and gmail, let the bidding start at $0"

(Read in Ron Howard voice) "He thought this was funny. But his employers didn't."

Simple use case that comes up for me quite often:

I'm reading a foreign sports site, and their videos will only show to people from that country.

Same with various national TV station sites.

I want to use one so my ISP can't sell my, and the rest of my family's, browsing history. Nothing to do with torrenting.

Yeah, now your VPN provider can instead. So much better.

The whole point of the article is that you need to do your research and choose someone that won't do that to you.

There's no way for them to guarantee that to you. It's just 100% marketing wank. If you want privacy use Tor or similar.

Unless you just setup your own VPN? Or maybe trust external auditors? Or otherwise spend time actually looking into service providers before giving them your money?

Setting up your own is better for doing it privately - takes out an unnecessary extra party at least. Still not perfect of course, the data center and ISPs can still see your traffic and connections on both sides, so still cannot be considered truly private.

Interesting that you say "external auditors" though - have any commercial VPN providers offered anything like that? Of course, it'd only be worth something if they'd put their money where their mouths are in a form of insurance payout if they were wrong.

The best consumer VPN service I have used is Privateinternetaccess. Never had an issue, they have been reliable and fast and support all clients. It is simple enough for children to use and very affordable.

I like Freedome from F-Secure pretty user friendly so it actually gets used...

https://www.f-secure.com/en/web/home_global/freedome

China. Get yourself in a place where every other page you try to visit is blocked and then you'd be a lot more thankful for VPN service.

Interestingly, I was just in China. Most of the things that used to be blocked worked perfectly fine for me. I barely used my VPN because even Facebook was working.

It does seem to vary quite a bit, I've always found that Shenzhen is a bit more lax with the firewall than even neighbouring Dongguan.

Are you sure you weren't set up with a VPN? I was there last week and all the usual stuff was blocked. However, I heard it was common to get routers that were already set up to perpetually be connected to a VPN.

China has opened up some sites in certain cities at certain hotels and on the cell network. It is not consistent. In Shenzhen as of May, it is this way. In Xi'an it is not as of last week. In March in Shenzhen I couldn't connect to FB over LTE.

Using public wifi networks

Especially when banking

I never really understood that one. Don't pretty much all banks use HTTPS these days? Wouldn't that make banks the type of site you'd be _least_ likely to need a VPN for?

I'd be more concerned about using a VPN when browsing other, less secure sites that don't support HTTPS.

Research. Some sites serve different content or adverts to different countries; some countries filter particular content. To research these effects you need endpoints in several different places.

To overcome nation-wide blacklists.

Because you live in a purple or yellow country - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/freedom-net-2016

That is some bullshit map you got there mate. I'm looking at the UK and Australia and thinking 'green?'. Yeah right.

Australia gets a low score if you read the report on that country - https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-net/2016/australia Maybe Eff or someone else has a better resource.

Hide browser history from employer?

Censorship circumvention for one.

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