Ask Lemmy

I would recommend using it only in the programs that actually need it, but it will be useless, for example, for banks, stores like Amazon, and so on, if you’ve already given them all your location information. A VPN is useful for browsing the internet, messaging with family, exchanging crypto, and on social networks where you don’t share personal information. For now, we can create a separate identity while we still have the opportunity

We use VPNs at work a lot for protecting traffic as it passes over the public internet between distant sites. From a security perspective, it's better not to give devices direct access to the internet if they don't actually need it. That's stuff we're running ourselves though; not a commercial VPN service we're paying for.

You are subject to over 300,000 laws. How do you know you're doing nothing illegal?

Im not sure if it works but you might be able to buy some steam games for cheaper.

Yes, definitely! If you are on public wifi, work wifi, or your home router is compromised (more likely than you think), the VPN can protect your traffic from being intercepted. It can also help you get around censorship if you live in a place where that is a problem.

Privacy is also important, even if you aren't doing anything wrong, because it's not just police watching, but all sorts of companies and individuals who will gladly harvest and sell your data, put you at risk, and give you nothing for it but trouble when your identity gets stolen or something.

A) if you trust your ISP less than you trust the VPN provider. Think about that for a bit, because there’s a lot of marketing from VPN providers about how they protect privacy, but how much of it is true? Most browsing data is encrypted today anyways. B) you want to pretend you’re in another country for licensing reasons. C) you travel to places where you don’t trust your ISP and/or use free wifi.

VPN providers are just there to allow you to switch countries for streaming services. Their security claims are ineffectual.

Setting up your own VPN is useful tool to connect to home servers while outside. Like home automation, security cameras, media box...

But illegal is totally subjective

As a privacy enhancement even beyond hiding from ISPs, a VPN has value for the private person when they connect to a public Wi-Fi network and need protection from attackers.

The primary activity of a VPN, extending a private network over a public network, does not only have value for organizations, but for private people like you and me, too. E.g. you need remote access on your NAS with media or in general your devices without making them directly accessible from the internet.

But overall, it's difficult to give you a definite answer, because it really depends on where you are from. E.g. in most European countries even bypassing geo-blocking won't get you in trouble as they are regulating it within the EU in the first place, while on the other side in China most VPNs are prohibited in general.

I don't know much about computer networks but all I know is when I go to my friend's house he insists I connect to his Wi-Fi but I use my VPN I don't know why but I always do because I learned from Reddit and Lemmy & YouTube type people that VPNs are a wise thing to use, and it upsets him I think because he cannot spy on what I'm doing. Because he has mentioned in the past some people who lived in his house he spied on all their internet activity because they were doing bad things. So if he could spy on people's internet activity when they are connected to his Wi-Fi in his house, he probably could spy on mine too but apparently he couldn't because I was using a VPN 🤷🏼‍♀️

I don't do anything nefarious or unethical on the internet, but I'd rather not my boyfriend be spying on everything I do. Just like I wouldn't want anybody staring at me constantly all day long, that's creepy. I just use the internet as my leisure time until I fall asleep.

Are you an adult in Texas who wants to legally watch porn but doesn't want their ID to be stored unencrypted on a Google drive? Then yes.

Yes

There is a big reason why we have the fourth amendment, jury trials, etc. - it's very easy to make an innocent person look guilty

Maybe you can start doing illegal things

I like to use a VPN while shopping. Especially for airline tickets. I don't log into anything until I'm ready to buy.

• Watching region-locked content without pirating it.

• buying games that are cheaper elsewhere in the world

What you consider legal now, could be considered grounds for arrest or worse if the world changes. And the world is always changing.

That said, if you have no interest in torrenting files or starting insurrections out of your basement, a VPN isn't going to do much for you. They're barely effective for actually protecting you if the actual government wanted to go after you for something and your data and personal info is already compromised by the fact that you're here, chatting on the internet. If you just browse social media it will give you a bigger headache to have it on since most sites now block VPN traffic and reddit will even permanently shadowban you if you log in under a VPN.

For me, it's when it's convenient. Opera has a VPN built in, so why not? I'm not so much worried about the government. I'm more worried about website owners.

I mean the main thing is you gotta then trust the vpn. you isp can see all sorts of stuff and at a hotspot same for what is running that. The vpn just becomes a new endpoint but many lay out that they run on servers that don't have logs and everything is in ram. Assuming you can trust them enough to do what they say then you know that they can't really look at your history and such. I don't use one but I could see using one and if I was living in a disposable income mode and that disposable income was high enough I would use one.

yes to bypass region-locked sites.

If you use a VPN that also provides DNS servers (e.g., Mullvad), you can prevent your ISP from snooping on your internet traffic and selling that information or having it hoovered up by government agencies and immediately tied back to you. HTTPS encrypts your internet traffic, but the metadata of what sites you are visiting and the frequency is typically enough to make some decent assumptions about what you are doing. No matter the legality of what you are doing, your data shouldn't be for sale and shouldn't be collected for government surveillance. Using a VPN cuts down on your information being available. There are still other ways it is collected, but there are other tools to mitigate that. The uBlock origin browser extension is a great first step.

In short, a VPN will help make your internet traffic a bit more secure and more private, but it won't grant you complete anonymity or necessarily protect you from sophisticated surveillance.

Disclaimer: I am just a lay person with self-taught experience. I am not an IT professional.

I use Apple’s “private relay” which I believe is not quite a VPN. Vendors collecting my data are given a unique ip in a different or more generic location, making it more difficult to aggregate. I hope this contributes to the general goal of reducing the exploitability of my data that they have collected.

At the very least they shouldn’t be able to learn my local travel habits

Are you an illegal person? Has your existence been declared illegal yet?