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comment by freehunter
freehunter  ·  3215 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: VPN - To use or not to use, that's the question

The best use case that everyone could consider righteous is to protect your information while you're connected to wifi that you do not control. If I'm at Starbucks, there is a greater-than-zero chance that someone could be sniffing my traffic. There is a greater-than-zero chance that someone could put up a false hotspot and read all of my traffic, read my passwords, read my email. If I'm on someone else's wifi connection, I fire up my VPN as it encrypts all traffic as it's going through.

Another good example is if you're on an Internet connection where your ISP plays with the traffic. For example, if your ISP throttles YouTube videos. Running through a VPN, they would never know what site you're on, so you have free access to information.

But really, everyone has something to hide. If you didn't have something to hide, you wouldn't have curtains in your house or locks on your doors. If you don't have something to hide, tell me your bank account login and your social security number. If you don't have anything to hide, take the password off your wifi, your laptop, and your smartphone. Everyone has something they're trying to hide, and it's almost never as malicious as people who say "you're trying to hide something" think it is. More often, it's just embarrassing, not malicious.





querx  ·  3215 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yes, something similar I said in the original post:

    If it is OK for you, that your ISP, websites, companies are to 99% (as always, there is no 100% in (IT) security and privacy) blocked from viewing what are you really doing or knowing who you really are (or let's say, see it more or less obfuscated), then it's fine. If you use a VPN to watch geo-restricted content, then it's perfectly fine. If you're using a VPN to do online banking securely from an open hotspot, it's really essential.