The title should be “You should understand what a VPN is for, before using one.”
Spends most of article telling you why they probably aren’t necessary.
Ends with 4 examples why they’re useful, which are the main reasons they’re used to begin with.
I feel like the opening sentences explained the reasoning behind the article sufficiently, even when there are plenty of valid use cases for them. This was mostly a response to manipulative marketing tactics:
Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, are popular services for (supposedly) increasing your security and privacy on the internet. They are often marketed as all-encompassing security tools, and something that you absolutely need to keep hackers at bay. However, many of the selling points for VPNs are exaggerated or just outright false.
They’re not the only ones pointing this out, either. Tom Scott released a video on the topic a few years ago to explain his thoughts VPN sponsorships
Your comment in no way negates my observation. If the clickbait title of the article was “You probably don’t need a VPN to avoid market tracking” or something similar, you’d have a point.
I was simply adding information your comment had left out, it wasn’t negating information at all. So congrats on getting the point, not everyone is trying to argue 🎉
…and since then, Tom Scott took a NordVPN sponsorship. And possibly SurfShark too?
He found that it was actually useful while in countries with questionable Internet access.
Personally, I just host my own VPN, so no matter where I am, all my traffic exits from my home ISP. I figure they’re at least accountable to the same laws I am.
But that’s the thing. When that Video was made, almost all of the advertising was focused on the same BS the article is disagreeing with.
I remember lots of NordVPN ads by uninformed nontechnical creators just reading the provided script. Saying that Balaklava wearing hackers will steal your credit card data just by being in the same cafe as you, and only an expensive VPN subscription can protect you from that. Or that only using a VPN will protect you from malware.
This sort of advertising is what Tom Scott critizied back then. IIRC he even said that there are real use cases, but that you shouldn’t believe the fearmongering. Same as the article.
The fearmongering advertising was the problem, not advertising the service itself.
Tom Scott released a video on the topic a few years ago to explain why he never took a VPN sponsorship
The opening scene of that video is from a VPN sponsorship he did.
This is inaccurate, read the pinned comment on the video where he points out that the opening scene is entirely made up and isn’t about a real person.
I don’t know if those useful features are the main reasons VPNs are used, though. There’s evidence they are used often for bypassing blocked sites (like VPN downloads jumping in Russia recently), most of the other advertised privacy and security benefits are questionable. Most of them don’t advertise torrenting/piracy because that’s a legal gray area.
My VPN advertises protected torrenting as a feature. Many do.
And it’s pretty nondebatable that VPNs are advertised for getting around regional blocking for Netflix etc, or generally getting around censorship like in China.
Ironically, almost all the exit VPNs are owned by either China or Israel. With a few exceptions.
Well, that article was a hot mess.
I appreciate the authors effort and they are correct about lack of “what is VPN” articles that are not written by VPN-vendors in marketing purpose. But I’m not sure if this was it.
Writing an article meant to “debunk” misconceptions and getting two core concepts, Security and Privacy mixed up right from the start wasn’t very good.
A lot of time was spent on explaining HTTPS and how it somehow magically makes you and your data secure on the Internet and it completely missed to mention who the potential threat actors thwarted by HTTPS are?
Could have probably used a chapter on how actual threats (both security and privacy) work and how don’t have much to do with the level of encryption your TCP/IP connection happens to encapsulate.
The last chapter with the first 3 bullets was pretty good though. That could have just been the whole article and it would have been alright.
Oh well. Attempt was made.
I know exactly how litigious Funimation is. I absolutely need a VPN. :D
Gonna have to disagree here. The article’s main point seems to be “privacy is impossible” because there are other ways to track you that it assumes you’re not accounting for:
It’s true that your IP address is your main identifier on the internet. However, there are many other identifiers that are used for tracking your activity across the internet. Most advertising networks, including Google Ads, primarily use cross-site cookies (eventually to be replaced by the Privacy Sandbox) to keep track of you across the web. Google uses an advertising ID for the same purpose on Android devices, and Apple has a similar ID for iPhone and iPad devices. VPNs do not change any of those identifiers.
There are also other browser features that can be used for tracking you across the web, such as the User Agent and HTML5 <canvas> element, in a process called fingerprinting. Web browsers have been reigning in this behavior over the past few years.
These are all true but there are also ways to circumvent (to some degree) all of those other tracking methods and doing so in conjunction with a VPN will give you a more private and secure browsing experience.
