I’ve been prodding around here, ELI5, and online for information regarding VPNs and it’s kind of mixed.
I primarily see people using VPNs for the ability to watch Netflix in other locations, pretend they are elsewhere, download not-free content for free, etc.
I’m just a person on the internet buying things from Amazon, paying bills, and browsing around for whatever information I feel like googling that day (like learning history, how to do something, etc)
I know VPNs help with privacy and security, but how important is that for someone like me? The only concern I have ever is getting a virus if I accidentally clicked on something like an ad if a webpage forced me to turn off adblocker (rare and recently got uBlock Origin too) . But, is that worth the cost of a VPN?
Not important at all. If you have a mobile phone then forget about privacy, so why go over the top with VPN. I use a wireguard VPN, but purely because my ISP at home has flaky IPv6 provision and I use the wireguard to route IPv6 traffic through my VPS which has a spare extra /48 (loads of IPv6 addresses) and I want to use IPv6. If it were not for that I would not use one at all.
A VPN is useful for connecting remotely back to your home network, they can get around regional blocks and can bypass restrictions imposed by your ISP (torrent sites for example).
If you’re connecting to public WiFi they can help to protect from ‘man in the middle’ type attacks although I find that some public WiFi won’t allow the use of VPN services so using mobile data may be better.
A VPN won’t prevent you from downloading and installing a virus and they won’t protect from phishing.
VPN is not special. VPN sole purpose is for remote connectivity to a Local network or connect sites together using the (internet) as transport. A VPN uses the same Cryptographic ciphers that any other website or anything that wants to have encrypted conversation uses. People are brain washed to believe a VPN is all in one thing. That’s only because these commercials are full of marketing terms to fool you into believing you need that service or product. A VPN will not “hide” your IP because your IP is still being seen by your VPN provider. Not only that since not only ur participating in a VPN connection to a network your not in control of, those people can log your data and snoop at what your looking at…you are connected to their network (virtually)…
If you’re doing internet stuff over public wifi/connection, especially stuff tied to an account with your credit card info or other sensitive info (like paid accounts you are automatically logged into):
Y E S
If your ISP throttles your connection: You probably want to. Have you tested the internet speeds you pay for?
My ISP doesn’t seem to be throttling when I have tested before. I rarely am outside of my house, especially now, but have occasionally used my laptop at college. I would say my phone is the biggest thing I use outside of the house for internet.
There are a number of reasons.
IPv4 has had its day, It is only possible to have more than one machine in your lan by doing all sorts of NAT stuff which is a further layer of unnecessary complexity in the system, the real world IP address that all your machines have to share is liable to change at irregular intervals (unless you are paying for fixed IP - and even then it is only one or two at most) Using IPv6 every machine on the lan has its own /64 subnet which is globally routable. I now have a fixed public IP for each machine hat I want to have one without any artificial juggling around. I now have DNS records set up for the LAN which make any machines I choose so much more easily reachable from wherever I travel. In order to do similar with IPv4 I have to do all sorts of unnecessary stuff to automatically check the current external IP and dynamically change the DNS zone.
It always amazes me how slowly IPv6 has been adopted around the world, considering the simplicity of it
Without a VPN your sensitive information like logins and credit card data etc is encrypted by TLS (HTTPS). If it would not be like that you’d shift trust from the wifi provider and the ISPs in between to the VPN server provider and its ISPs in between.