Check Your IP Reputation Score

TL;DR these VPN offerings don't provide privacy since we are merely exchanging who is doing the surveillance.

Long version: The problem with these are that instead of now denying a service to privacy-conscious users, these users are being profiled big tech companies that can afford to do more sophisticated things like track you across the internet using trackers and browser fingerprinting and thus don't need to rely on IP addresses. By profiling you they are themselves able to guarantee geolocation or to kick you permanently out of their VPN if you violate their arbitrary ToS.

And that they are profiling you is totally making sense too: Otherwise how would they be able to keep any malicious activity at bay.

> legitimate reasons

Yes, these are legitimate reasons. But does the need of a number of profit-based tech companies outweigh the need of society for privacy?

I doubt it! Since it doesn't seem fair that everyone must suffer for the benefit of a few.

The entire problems is made more complicated by:

1) lawmakers that don't understand that you simply cannot perfectly replicate.

It particular the need for geoblocking shows how arbitrary laws even are, if the same thing is lawful in one state but not the next.

Thus it seems contrived to do surveillance on everyone just so that a few companies who insist on having an internet presence can emulate physical geopresence.

There should be a law that states that if it takes too much of a toll on privacy to emulate physical behavior, you should be forbidden to seek to emulate it.

2) the fact that you can put an exact number of how much money you save as a business by using such scores, but you cannot put an exact number on how detrimental privacy loss is, since thst evolves on a very slow timescale. The latter only becomes visible really late, like a silent but terminal disease that barely in the very last stages begins to show itself: For example, when you reach China-style surveillance. Only then most people ask themselves: How did we get there?

To conclude: I don't particularly blaim your service for that since you are simply acting within a web of incentives and probably your livelihood depends on it - and if that is the case you can't possibly be expected to make an obiective decision (sorry if I was a bit harsh in this entire back-and-forth). Though if I were running such a company at least I'd make sure to donate some funds to non-profits that promote privacy and the use of VPNs/Tor for everyone - somewhat similar to CO2 reduction certificates that CO2 emitters buy.

> our scores help reduce the hassle or friction that legitimate users are subjected to

I'm telling you right here, I am a legitimate user and when businesses fall for the garbage story you're pushing, it makes me less likely to remain their customer. Hassling customers with repeated rounds of "click on all the cars" "no you're wrong" is terrible UX. It could be understandable if it popped up after a few failed logins in a row, but putting the nagwall front and center is appalling design.

I look forward to Apple's VPN increasingly demonstrating just how wrong your marginalizing surveillance mindset is.

It seems like you're trying to imply an association, while avoiding having to make the "if you have nothing to hide" argument explicitly.

While I would like to believe you the problems is that until there is a law on how much you can pester people with captchas (and you basically can pester them into oblivion) , privacy-conscious people are simply at the mercy of the sysadmin deciding for them how usable the company service is made. Which is a decidedly bad state of affairs, since he could simply wake up at any day, whip up Google-style captcha-ing and as a VPN user you simply would have no option for recourse :(

They are a good thing! Your mind has changed because your work has changed and you now are solely confronted with the negative aspects of using VPNs and Tor.

I'm pretty sure if you would have worked at an NGO on free speech you'd still be convinced of VPNs and Tor.

From you are staying the solution îs probably to increase the number of legitimate and responsable VPN/Tor users so that sysadmins don't automatically associate VPN/Tor with criminal usage patterns.