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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

As a security person, I am somewhat baffled by the popularity of VPNs. I have no idea why anyone would use them for general internet usage, and I suspect the majority of VPN service users are misinformed about what they think they are gaining.

Any VPN subscribers want to fill me in? The only thing I can think of is hiding the source of pirated media being shared via bittorrent.

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Because my government passed a legislation that forces all ISPs to collect all metadata and to store them and this information is accessible to be searched by multitude of government departments without a warrant.

I am, in principle against this policy. When it was proposed, I tried activism and letter writing and meeting with Senate staffers to try and fight it. I lost, it became law with bipartisan support from both major parties here. So now I use a VPN.

You find my usecase baffling?

A lot of countries block access to websites. US and EU are not the whole world! VPN helps people to circumvent censorship.

I use a VPN daily because without it, there is no Twitter/HackerNews/Reddit/Youtube/... .

Totally understood for those countries, but it’s still hugely popular in the US. That’s what I’m wondering about.

Many ISPs in the US perform DPI, sell anonymized data to marketing companies, slowdown YouTube/Netflix when the backend pipes are congested, etc. If you want your ISP to provide you with a dumb pipe and not interfere with your traffic, a VPN is an easy solution.

In practice, you’re almost certainly not getting faster netflix or youtube by adding an extra VPN into the congestion path. There are some weird edge cases where particular peering agreements and anycast routing quirks leave some exceptions to that, but I highly doubt a non-negligible amount of users are actually seeing a consistent speed increase on a VPN, and the vast majority would definitely see a decrease. That VPN is doing more to interfere with traffic than an ISP is.

As for tracking you and selling your data, I trust my ISP to behave better in that regard than I do some shady VPN provider. And I don’t even trust my IP that much.

Biggest real usage I know of, and why people I know use VPNs, is piracy. I've never had my ISP send a letter about anything, but some people I know would get warnings pretty often. Some countries even make it a criminal matter. VPNs help reduce the risk.

And there are people who use it for more legal media consumption, like paying for a subscription-based service and the shows/movies they want to see are region locked.

Because in the US at least, part of ISPs business model comes from deep packet inspection of customers websites, dns queries, habits and subsequent selling (or using) that data. If you have a trusted VPN you can prevent that data and privacy siphoning. "trusted" VPN company is a discussion for another time...

Sharing an IP address with a load of other people makes one more anonymous. I know there are lots of different ways of identifying someone online but it is a start. My ISP is also behind a CGNAT so I am also sharing that IP with loads of other people and also most ISPs don’t provide static IP addresses so you can’t rely on an that either but I guess I also trust my VPN provider to handle identifying data more than my ISP as I haven’t even given them my name (Mullvad)

I use it to stream stuff on Netflix that isn't available in my country of residence.

There are four primary reasons to use a VPN.

1) You live in an authoritarian country where mass surveillance is a concern.

2) Evading geo restrictions. Watching US Netlix while in Europe, etc.

3) Evading your work's firewall so they don't know you're on Facebook or whatever.

4) Piracy

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