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Comment by neltnerb | Hacker News Reader

The main reason I started using a (paid) VPN is because I legitimately don't trust my phone company to not track what websites I go to. I trust a company I pay to not do that much more.

I absolutely expect a typical phone company to do this regularly since they have the required access, their customers mostly aren't saavy enough to realize it's possible, and they don't get paid to not do it. I realize you're merely shifting who you trust but I would trust a company I pay to keep my browsing private much more than a phone company that wants to make every possible penny off of me.

Is this not actually a valid use case?

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The way I understand it is that if you don’t trust your ISP then a VPN is a suitable choice, if you don’t trust your government then much more serious technological measures are required and even then it’s fairly unlikely you’re winning against a state organisation that’s decided it specifically doesn’t like you.

I don’t trust either my government or my phone company to be honest, but I’m not doing anything that would offend my government so I’m not enormously worried about them while my ISP and phone company have a strong incentive to abuse my privacy and monetise my traffic further. Even if they didn’t, VPNs offer protection when using public WiFi which can often be badly set up. Having said that using a free VPN is asking to get mugged off in my opinion, paid VPN providers at least have an incentive not to compromise your privacy as it’d be bad for their business.

>it’s fairly unlikely you’re winning against a state organisation that’s decided it specifically doesn’t like you.

My threat model isnt that the government has 11 people dedicated to tracking my every move each with license to use zero days to get access to my deepest secrets.

It's that they're engaged in dragnet surveillance with all domestic ISPs and someone somewhere will one day either run a search on my name looking for something specific or look for a name linked to something specific (people who visit X website).

If that happens I'd like what pops up to say "oh, he used a foreign VPN for 6 years" while others will have every nook and cranny of their lives on full display.

I tunnel everything through an overseas server for the same reason, but it's waived away in the blog as "not gaining anything" and "shifting the trust from one ISP to another" - Well, yes. That's the point.

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