Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand.

I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identity theft", or my personal favorite: "to protect my bank accounts".

Not a single person has said "I pay to route my traffic through an unknown intermediary to obscure its origin" or "I installed new root certificates to increase my security."

This is my feeling too. I also don't think these people realize how none of these groups can refuse a subpoena so the scenario of "the government coming after me," doesn't get addressed either.

Worse, some of these are tied to foreign nation state intelligence, who are now analyzing your data when before they couldn't because they didnt have a relationship with your ISP. Domestically, I wouldnt be surprised if all of this data from US owned VPNs is shipped to the NSA or other groups and analyzed. After the Snowden reveals its hard to really see this stuff as conspiracy anymore.

Weird technical issues happen because a lot of services don't keep vpn's in mind. I saw a lot of people were having issues connecting to multiplayer game servers. The vpn provider broke something, maybe it was on a blacklisted IP, maybe increased latency, maybe the IP is in the wrong region and people are connecting to a NA server but are in LATAM, etc.

I really dont know the use case for a vpn, not to mention advertising snooping happens on the application level anyway. Its javascript running on my browser and html5 and heaven knows what else analyzing me for ads, not "what IP did you connect from."

Lastly, there are privacy tools like onion and running a browser with no js active. These vpn types dont do that. They're actually not getting the privacy and security they want because tor is slow and a no-js firefox is unfun. So this weird cargo cult of VPNs has appeared, similar to stuff like "disable UAC" and other "computer enthusiast" knowledge you see in gamer or low information forums. Its the blind leading the blind here and these capitalist opportunists absolutely are taking advantage of that. "I'm safe I have a vpn," is a normal thing to say even though its almost entirely wrong.

The only practical use case I can think of is torrents where the legal and political will to subpoena a vpn provider is low, so its this weird loophole where you can torrent but your ISP will never be informed. For now I suppose until the IP holders think the legal fees are worth it or get a law passed to sidestep subpeonas.