Hoping to hear what your particular use case is to shell out that monthly fee.
1) a corporate VPN you connect to in order to gain access to corporate resources. Cisco AnyConnect, OpenVPN, IPsec/L2TP are examples of this type.
2) An overlay network that allows seamless (and secure) access to systems on disparate networks. Wireguard (and thus Tailscale), ZeroTier are examples of this type.
3) A way for individuals to obscure their internet traffic by tunneling it to a VPN provider. Mullvad, PIA, Nord are examples of this type.
All of the sponsorships you see are from companies in category #3. It is my opinion that there are very few circumstances where using a VPN (#3) is useful or needed. HTTPS is ubiquitous, and browsers have various mechanisms for MitM prevention and other anti-spoofing/anti-tampering mechanisms. Taken together, these provide a high degree of protection that wasn’t necessarily as widely-deployed just a handful of years ago - a time when using a VPN was more useful.
Are there situations where using a VPN (#3) is warranted? Yes, for sure. However, these content creators who are taking sponsor money from VPN providers are doing their viewers a disservice by making them think they need a VPN. 99% of the public does not, and should not waste their money on it.
Anonymity and therefore privacy. An ISP-assigned IP address reveals a lot of information about you. With a court order it can be traced back to you. Suppose a dissident wants to publish information adverse to the government, there's a situation.
Most (all?) streaming services are geo-locked, and do not contain the same libraries in different markets (if they are available at all.)
So VPNs are a common way of accessing streaming which would otherwise be unavailable.
While this is "piracy of a sort", it does imply an actual paid subscription, albeit in the wrong territory. So its more-honest than the alternative (plex etc)
Net good, net bad, somewhere in between?
That said, I'm aware my stuff is pirated, for various reasons, and I pretty much ignore that. Pirate users might turn into customers one day. I make minimal effort to prevent piracy, mostly to make sure the experience for paid users is as simple and streamlined as possible.
I prefer to consume my media via paid channels, and that is easy and convenient (and cheap) to do (now) so that's much easier to do now than it was 20 years ago.
My attitude to open source licensing is the same. I'll happily integrate MIT licensed material into commercial offerings, but I respect the rights of GPL authors, and I understand that is off the table. I believe authors have a right to choose the license they want, commercial, open or free, and it's up to me to respect that right.
In general my view is "piracy bad, working around geo-blocks ok".
Interestingly this roughly reflects the view of regulators in my jurisdiction[1]:
> The Productivity Commission (PC) in December 2016 recommended that the Government make it easier for consumers to access legitimate copyright-protected content by:
> amending the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) to make clear that the circumvention of geo-blocking technology by consumers is not an infringement of copyright; and
> avoiding international obligations that would prevent or ban consumers from circumventing geo-blocking technology.
> the ACCC supported the PC’s recommendation,
[1] https://incompetition.com.au/2017/12/blocking-geo-blocking/
Even tor, if not used very carefully.
In what case would a commercial VPN provider, which will have a payment path associated to you, be better than something like Tor for the sort of user who fears government retribution?
Commercial VPN services are pretty much exclusively for doing things that annoy copyright holders. They're great for that, but for almost any other use case where one might want a VPN they're not the best choice.
If I would have been using a VPN, I think the barrier would have been too high for the local police to do this on their own. According to the warrants, the local cyber investigators literally emailed comcast and they just sent them over my physical address.
With a good VPN, I think there would have been some red tape or at least a few more hurdles to complicate the situation.
This probably isn't the normal use case... but I now try to use a VPN, not because I'm doing anything nefarious or that I think it's truly anonymous. I just know it will raise the effort required to ruin my life in this same way again.
2) Security if in public eifi environments.
3) Occasionally to obfuscate information if I want to download a movie or look at information, nothing interesting/nefarious but maybe you want to look at health stuff and not feel some insurance company is going to target you for ads or assume you have the condition type thing.
4) Using phone for international travel. If you use a server in your home county, turn on wifi calling and use the phone as normal for calls/text. This is how it should be.
2. Playing games on the internet with creeps who will dig through IP logs for my location. Yes, they can fingerprint my device, but device is easier to change and safer than location info.
3. Tricking Netflix into thinking I'm in Australia so I can watch Rick & Morty.
It's not that nefarious to go around region blocks to get access to content that probably shouldn't have been blocked from you in the first place. If I'm traveling, I'm still the same person they let watch the same program at home. Or, if I want to watch Russian State controlled news, why does my government get to block it?
Woah, is this a real example? Where do you live?
https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022...
And to head off any speculation, I'm aware of what RT is, I just don't need any nannies that think I might not understand how propaganda works.
This prevents them from creating my profile and helps me protect my privacy. (I hope so).
I have made a concious decision that I would rather trust a VPN like Mullvad than my internet provider or websites.
In the uk they are legally required to store it for 12 months as well
I don't have direct exposure but this is a highly commoditized industry with tons of competition. I imagine profits are razor thin for most providers.
“Privacy is not about having something to hide.”
Plus I torrent a bunch of stuff of course :v
- Spoofing geolocation to watch geo-locked content like BBC iPlayer (You need a UK IP for this)
- Torrenting. I don’t want to get scare letters from my ISP, so I use a VPN. I find Wireguard to be the fastest in this case.
- Protecting my network traffic on shady public Wi-Fi. Some public Wi-Fi hotspots could be malicious and could be spying or tampering with your connection.
Eg, in Quake, the current e-sports tournament is being played "cross-region", people in US and EU and Oceania compete against each other. Using a VPN can shave some milliseconds off the "ping time" to the servers they're playing on (I think the rule is to use consecutively one server in each player's region).
So if the demographic of the youtubers that you mentioned is gamers, then maybe VPNs have their place, not for opsec, but for plain faster internet to remote servers.
yup, that's the reason. and the youtubers and the vpn companies aren't even trying to hide it - they straight-up say it in the ads.
[1] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/natio...
Either "legit" piracy so you can watch content you pay for from another country, or less legitimate piracy.
Translating your IP to your street address would require some larger network compromise (probably at the ISP level) or actually getting PII from your ISP.
There's also geolocation data compiled by browsers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Location_Service
> There are multiple public databases available via web search, which can map residential, relatively static, IP addresses within a few city blocks, at least in large urban areas.
I have never seen anything like this. Can you link to one? IP addresses just don't resolve to that level of detail, even in large urban areas. My own IP address (in a large urban area) resolves to a city ~25 miles away from me.
> There's also geolocation data compiled by browsers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Location_Service
This doesn't use IP. It uses local network IDs.
Design intentions are different from what exists today, where an ISP can assign a residential home IP that remains the same until their CPE is rebooted, which can often be several months.
> IP addresses just don't resolve to that level of detail.
That depends on what the geolocation service provider is willing to publish, keeping in mind their ability to cross-reference with multiple signal sources. e.g. if someone enters their home address into a site for shipping/delivery, what are the chances that at least one ad-tech data broker on that page is linking their IP to the user-entered street address? There are many other potential signal sources.
> It uses local network IDs.
Which have often been precisely geolocated by cellphones (with GPS) or StreetView mapping vehicles. The browser also has access to IP address that is "near" those SSIDs..
2. Censorship.
3. An overlay network. Not really possible with most traditional commercial VPN services, but it will allow access to home devices and remote servers seamlessly.
Plus of course there's the company vpn for working from not-the-office.
For hiding my IP for web surfing, I use Tor instead since it's free.