Never go with deals like that. Only use VPNs recommended by known privacy communities like PrivacyGuides And even when you use them, keep in mind that VPN merely shifts trust from your ISP to the VPN provider, it does not make you anonymous, that's why you should still exercise caution anyway. You can read more here
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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I'm wary of sites like that. It's so easy for a bad actor to put one up in order to guide you to a compromised service.
It's not like you're going to audit everything yourself to ensure a service isn't compromised. You have to put some degree of trust into some entity like that anyway. Also, the community is really nice, you can join their Matrix room or a forum and ask why a specific service is listed, if you want to know more
The best VPN service is to create your own. Rent a small cloud server on a far away country, and install Open VPN. This is the best form of secrecy online, that I can think of. Of course, it's still possible to identify you. But it seems much harder to do so.
Either your VPN server would need to have it's connections monitored, or access to logs from the problematic websites would be required. It's also necessary for the company which is hosting your server to disclose that your VPN server's IP is associated with you. And even then, if you encrypt everything in it, there is still room for plausible deniability. But all of this, is a much bigger hassle to the authorities than to just use a traditional VPN service.
With a normal VPN, especially if they have servers in NATO countries, they will provide all logs requested to them and you're toast. Basically, you're paying for a false sense of security.
Yes exactly this, though, I prefer wiregaurd over openvpn, instant connection times and tunnels don't have to stay open and reconnect so you can always have it on even when moving between networks, there are certain cloud providers that can be bought from almost entirely anonymously too
What benefit do you believe a VPN provides for you? Are you using it to fake your location for content access or do you believe that the vpn is improving your privacy somehow?
Privacy and pirating
What's funny to me is your username is the name of a (maybe defunct, not sure) VPN service. It was known to be shitty and shady.
Go with a company at least not located in the US. Avoid PIA, they were bought by a shady company. The ones the piracy community tends to trust would be: ProtonVPN, Mullvad, IVPN, AirVPN. Be warned Mullvad recently dropped port forwarding which really hurts torrenting connectivity and speeds. I would try for a provider that continues to allow port forwarding if you're doing any torrent stuff.
Privacy. Books can and are written on the subject. I'll just say try and avoid doing things that link back to you while on the VPN. Don't log into your bank account or email accounts (except those you have registered and only use over VPN) while on a VPN if you can help it. If you sign up for accounts on torrent sites (public or private trackers), use an email not associated with your real identity.
If you're in the EU it allows you to see content that have been blocked since article 17 was voted. Also you can also buy some things for cheaper by switching country.
Why not use free VPN? Theres plenty of obscure ones out there.
No VPN service is free. If you're not paying them, they're profiting off of you having their VPN service in some other way (like Onavo, which sold your VPN traffic).
I don't trust a VPN provider that I have not given a reason to not sell my data.
Well they usually have a small selection of slower free servers and a lot of faster ones locked behind a premium wall. Does this not substitute as profit for them?
Depends on the provider, but probably they would be analyzing the traffic of the free users the very most to profit off of them. Maybe they're trying to convert them to paying users, maybe they're selling the data, and it could be tricky to figure out which.
The "free" servers aren't free, they have some specific reason why it's profitable for them to run servers where users aren't paying with money. They're capitalists.
And what would prevent paid VPNs from selling data to have even bigger profits? Its all a gamble, be it free VPN or not.
In the end of the day I just want to pay less
It's a gamble if you haven't done research into which VPN providers are trustworthy. r/VPN has a decent comparison table (maybe there's a good community on the fediverse? I haven't checked). You can find discounts for VPN providers from that table that seem trustworthy to you at r/vpncoupons (not aware of a fediverse replacement for that either).
The privacy-friendly VPN providers have one thing in common: they're all paid, afaik.
Thanks for the link ๐
But I am a little concerned that the most popular VPNs rank the highest
True, any table like that could certainly be biased. There's other comparisons out there, like the one on Wikipedia. Tables like that are only a starting point, ofc, it's up to you to decide who you trust.