Is there really any point in using a VPN anymore in 2023?

VPN
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I am starting to realise that using any VPN service marks you as a “second class citizen”. By this I mean, blocked from using a variety of websites. This could be something simple like stopping you posting, talking, joining or “shadow banning” you. I noticed this when I made a Microsoft account to play with my family on Minecraft and would throw up connection errors until the VPN was shut down.

It is not the few services either, it seems like the majority. Facebook, Snapchat, Omegle, Kik, Google, Microsoft, Steam, Discord, 4chan and yes even Reddit. Basically, anyway to can communicate socially online, play games or just access services you are excluded partially or entirely. Some services will let you use a VPN on the condition you give them your mobile number, in which case they can tie your identity to the account and hence your location which defeats the purpose of the vpn all together. If you refuse to give them your mobile, you could enter the email and it will just make you go through “additional authentication methods” which always somehow tie your real life identity to the account.

So is there really any point in using VPNS? My VPN is a good app and I feel happy not having every little thing I read and watch isn’t catalogued and fed back to me in ads and sold to third parties. I find it really intrusive and as a law abiding citizen I should have the right to use any service I want without giving away any identifying information as I am a law abiding citizen. What gives?

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2

It depends what you’re doing on the internet, and for what purposes you intend to use the VPN. For me, a VPN isn’t a “daily driver” kind of thing. I don’t usually want to use a VPN while playing games, for example, with some exceptions such as joining privately hosted servers. I like it for other things, such as joining a teamspeak server (since some are run by trash admins, and they can see your IP address). I like it to keep my data private, so that my ISP can not detect what my data is and throttle me based on it. For example, some providers, especially phone services, will detect when you are streaming youtube, and throttle you down so it will bottleneck at anything higher than 720p resolution.

It’s a matter of balancing privacy with convenience. If a website blocks my connection because I’m on a VPN, then I don’t really need to use that site. On the other hand, I’ve never noticed any sites that I’m blocked on while on my VPN. Perhaps the service you are using is free, and has a lot of users who are malicious, and so their VPN servers have been blacklisted?