• Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    6 months ago

    “Almost everyone” seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don’t want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.

    I take offence to the “protect against hackers” bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.

    • sobanto@feddit.de
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      6 months ago

      Who do you trust more? Your isp, or a random vpn Company that not only own one vpn-service, but surprisingly many. (Nord security owns NordVPN and Surfshark, Kape owns ExpressVPN and Cyberghost). And wouldn’t it be need if you, as NSA, would have a direct connection to the data people concerned with there privacy? It’s not like their “no log” policy really exists if the have to write logs by law.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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        6 months ago

        That’s the point of VPNs, isn’t it? Do you trust the companies that sell your location information to shady people like bounty hunters or some foreign VPN company?

        Personally, I trust Mullvad more than I trust many ISPs. It all depends on how good your ISP is and your country’s laws are. ISPs here in the Netherlands used to collect the IP addresses and other metadata of all websites you visit, as well as location information, for six months or more, because the law forced them to, in case the police ever needed that information. The law got overturned (though that doesn’t mean ISPs can’t track you anymore, they’re just not forced to) but this definitely feels like a reason for an always-on VPN to me. The government also pushed for IPv6 not because it’s not 1980 anymore, but because they foolishly thought that it would give every device a unique IP address so they could track people better.

        Not that I want to evade the police, but when crazy religious people get in power, I don’t want to get convicted for contacting porn sites at some point. VPN providers that you don’t trust not to log anything are still better for privacy than that.

        Some VPN providers lie and say they will never log anything (only for lawsuits to prove otherwise). You can’t trust those. I consider every VPN that pays for YouTube ads to be untrustworthy. Mullvad, and some of its competitors, however, seem to be relatively trustworthy.

        With VPNs, you move your point of tracking to another company or country. Whether that benefits you depends on who you are, where you live, and what your priorities are.