Comment by cisasteelersfan

3 years ago

Why would I even want to use a VPN in the first place?

Hide your DNS queries and SNI from your network admin mom, as you browse pornhub.com

Also, Azerbaijanian Netflix is real hot these days.

Because your ISP is probably selling your browsing history to the highest bidder, and there are a legion of data brokers out there collating every scrap of information they can get their hands on to build profiles about you.

To everyone who shrugs, and says they have nothing to hide, Would you feel comfortable wearing a T shirt in public that went into grim detail about everything you'd rather keep private, are insecure about, or might open you up to discrimination? Would you be willing to wear that to a job interview? To your bank when getting a loan?

  • > Because your ISP is probably selling your browsing history to the highest bidder

    That is unlikely in the EU. It would be a gross GDPR violation.

A chance for a better route. When I connect directly to Hetzner's storage boxes I generally get about 10 Mbps. When I go through a local VPN I get about ten times that.

In no particular order:

1. To pirate content without getting sent threat letters or being sued

2. To prevent your ISP or the wifi access point or anyone else from seeing which domains you are connecting to and selling that data

3. To prevent government surveillance or blocking

4. To bypass corporate or institutional firewall rules

5. To prevent packet sniffers from snooping on public wifi

6. To prevent your parents, spouse, or relatives from seeing your browsing habbits in router logs

7. To access geo-locked content on streaming services

  • 1. To pirate some content which isn't relevant for 99.9999% of the population yet still protected by Disney law

  • 1. Nobody does gets those in Eastern Europe 2. This is a GDPR violation 3. If you have to hide something from your government then you should probably use something better than a commercial VPN. 4. Corporate internet usage is tied to your corporate account and the use of a non-sanctioned VPN is a massive red flag.

I usually wireguard through home to keep public wifi from sniffing, as well as so my phone can use my pihole for dns instead of the mobile network's dns.