It’s insane how VPN services have taken over the internet nowadays. Subscribing to a commercial VPN really make no sense unless you are specifically trying to circumvent some regional content access restriction.

If you don’t trust your ISP with your data, why would you trust a VPN provider? By using a VPN you don’t become “more secure” you’re just paying some other party to have your browsing data instead of your ISP. It’s just a transfer of your trust from the ISP to the VPN provider.

VPNs are a marketing product. They exist not because there’s a reason to use them all the time but because personal data is the “new gold” and every business is now getting creative about ways to get it.

Oh let’s route [people’s] internet traffic through [our servers] us and charge people for it and say it has something to do with privacy.

Luke Smith

Your ISP has a commercial interest in protecting your privacy – after all if they become known to sell or leak your browsing history, they’ll lose customers.

How can you be so sure that a VPN company in a remote country isn’t profiting from your data in every way they can? Do you just believe them because they say “we care about your privacy”?

For years “experts” (and their ToS) labeled ProtonVPN/ProtonMail as the most private / secure services out there and that wouldn’t sell or leak your data, not even to legal authorities. Guess what? They have recently handed over records to the police.

With a VPN you’re, ironically, paying someone to use and steal your data!

In the US people may get copyright infringement notifications like “you downloaded this movie; you better not do that again or we’ll turn off your Internet” but realistically speaking nobody ever lost their Internet. ISPs are required to send those notices however, they aren’t required to do anything else about it / turn off connections. This makes VPN services useless for torrents as well.

Around 20 years ago you could get sued by some big media company for downloading a movie, however they eventually realized that it’s really bad press. Suing someone is also an expensive and time-consuming process – it’s just not worth it.

In Europe VPNs are even more pointless because ISPs aren’t required to notify anyone about their downloads. They can’t legally even snoop around in your Internet traffic let alone sell your data. Media groups in Europe also have a hard time suing anyone because the legal system is way slower and way more bureaucratic than in the US.

Oh but my country blocks this and that website.

Uninformed Generic Person

When governments block a website, they’re most likely just applying DNS restrictions. You may get around this easily and for free with an alternative DNS service such as 1.1.1.1 or Google DNS. Google it.

For your own safety don’t blindly use a VPN for all your traffic. Don’t use a VPN unless you really know what you’re doing.