What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship?
It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN.
Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443449).
For researching confidential topics, TOR appears to be fine.
VPN may have better network bandwidth, or may be blocked from less websites than TOR exit nodes I guess.
I don't have a choice of ISPs. It's not a competitive market and they have no incentive to respect my privacy in the slightest.
In contrast I can choose any VPN provider in the world. It's a competitive market and they have strong incentives to respect privacy because it's one of their main selling points. Any VPN that is discovered to not be respecting privacy will lose a lot of business in short order.
Sure you can say that they can violate privacy in secret, but that's a big risk for them. It's no risk at all for an ISP because their customers have no choice. It's no guarantee, but it's definitely a better situation to use a company that actually has incentives aligned with yours.
That answers it for many people, I would guess. Even without censorship, many ISPs have a much worse track-record for gathering and subsequently selling information than, say, Mullvad does.
Is it an absolute that Mullvad doesn't log/sell information? No, of course not. But they make a much more convincing case than my ISP does.
Geoblock avoiding is another common answer. My ISP also sends out letters if you torrent, which can be annoying to receive - Mullvad alleviates that.
Here in Germany the rights of ISP users are supposedly better protected than in other jurisdictions.
At least that's what I heard on this podcast [0], latest episode iirc.
Yet you can't watch age restricted youtube videos without giving them your ID or credit card information. In the name of "protecting children".
The German government also threatened to ban Telegram which would have put them in line with places like China, Russia, Cuba and Iran. I think Telegram folded and now removes channels at their request in order to avoid being fully censored.
> Is it an absolute that Mullvad doesn't log/sell information? No, of course not. But they make a much more convincing case than my ISP does.
That's not the only deciding factor though, is it? Mullvad (not singling them out, but just for sake of illustration) is in many ways is more attractive to bad actors because it centralizes users seeking privacy. On top of that, you're adding additional software and network complexity which equals attack surface. There's more to consider than what appears at face value when considering whether a VPN is appropriate.
Of course there is more to it than a single dimension, I just didn't think it necessary to write out each and every consideration as the risk analysis will change per user.
The trade-off is worth it, for me personally, including when those other factors are considered.
ISPs are often in a more powerful position, in the sense that they often have more streams of data to you than just your internet usage. E.g. your mobile service provider is also your ISP when you're on the go, thus they also have your call and text history and location history to correlate with your browsing history.
On top of that there's also the value of just having privacy even if the ISP can be trusted. E.g. I might not mind being seen naked by a friend, but I would still prefer for that to not happen.
In general I think a lot of the big providers who have gone without incidents (and without major changes) for a long time can be trusted. I feel the incidents with Proton were somewhat overblown, since their page on legal notices received did mention that they could be compelled to log IP addresses (or at least that's how I remembered it). But even without that, I think Mullvad has been pushing for "system transparency" where users can verify all the software that's running on their servers, which is a step in the right direction towards providing confidence that they are indeed not logging anything.
Avoiding my university or workplace from snooping on my traffic.
I’ve had it where I was served an add from a server that had previously been implicated in a bot net operation. The university told me I was infected and that my computer was not allowed back on the network until I came in person to show them that I had done a full wipe and reinstall of my OS.
I personally use it to evade IP-based tracking, for random example LinkedIn. Try browsing LI from your home. LI will suggest that you connect to others in your home. Even though I have a fake LI profile, not linked to other members of my household, so this doesn't actually invade my privacy, it's still yucky that they maintain a shadow connection between us. There are tons of sites/services that do this kind of simple yet invasive tracking.
I also use it in rare cases for torrenting or downloading content. I normally have other methods for torrenting and seeding privately but in some cases I want another level of privacy (nothing illegal/bad/censor worthy, and therefore would be ok with law enforcement connecting the dots through VPN), a level that VPN serves well.
I am glad that the VPN providers sell people on nonsense, on protections they can't guarantee (to Western countries anyway). This makes the service actually available at all. To me it's an analog of the https-everywhere cargo cult, that makes it super easy these days to get a free SSL cert.
No technology is perfect. It doesn't make it useless.
For me one big use case: avoiding stupid geoblocks on motorsport streams. Often streams are available in countries where the licence has not been sold on Youtube or the websites of the sport itself (sometimes for free, sometimes as a subscription).
For example Formula 1 has F1TV that you can only sign up for in some countries (where they didn't sell out to Sky essentially).
Like, I don't even mind paying for a service if it's good and actually available!
Sent a link (yt, less than a couple of minutes long) to two friends (in different, and not my, countries).
Both blocked.
One friend changed location via vpn and watched the video. The other, no vpn, didn't see the video AND said they wouldn't ever use a vpn as they have 'nothing to hide'.
This is what I use mine for. If PIA is secretly logging they aren’t going to reveal that info and ruin their business model for whatever you call a DMCA request in Canada regarding my torrent activities.
> What are people using VPNs for mostly, if they're living in a country without internet censorship?
I find it's a convenient way to prevent services beyond my ISP from knowing where am I based on IP address.
All of those apps you have on your devices presumably have permanent connections back to their servers and they can very easily tell if you're at home, out on mobile data, in an office, or in a cafe/public library or even in a different country.
With a VPN, they currently think I'm in Dallas; which I'm nowhere near right now.
Many apps on your phone are entitled to read WiFi SSID's, mapping your location as accurately as GPS - and indoors, too! Go ahead and google "where am I" with a native Android/iOS search app with your VPN enabled, you may be surprised by the results. Not to mention accelerometers and other sensors can reliably predict your movement and location, too.
There's significantly more competition among VPNs than there are among ISPs in any given area, so it should be no surprise that some VPNs are more trusted than ISPs. Most people have only a few choices for their ISP, and maybe only one that offers the features they require (for example, only one ISP in my area offers high enough upload speeds to reasonable backup my computers). In many cases people don't have a choice of ISP that will keep their data private.
Therefore, you are trading trusting your ISP for trusting your VPN, but at least you are getting someone who says they care about your privacy (rather than someone who has a track record of not caring) and someone who would face significant business repercussions if they became untrusted, rather than someone that would face almost no business repercussions.
> may be blocked from less websites than TOR exit nodes I guess.
Try routing all your traffic through TOR and trying to navigate the modern web or common apps. It is _extremely_ punishing when you connect through TOR exit nodes.
I used to run a relay and they are even hostile to relays. I had to stop because my family was asking why their banking apps didn’t work on the Wi-Fi and why they always get warnings and CAPCHAs only at home.
It's either your ISP or the VPN provider, which can log the websites you have visited, so there isn't a clear advantage of using a VPN. Sure the VPN provider may claim to log nothing, but that's hard to confirm and not proven to be true in some cases (related thread regarding Protonmail: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443449).
For researching confidential topics, TOR appears to be fine. VPN may have better network bandwidth, or may be blocked from less websites than TOR exit nodes I guess.