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A lot of countries block access to websites. US and EU are not the whole world! VPN helps people to circumvent censorship. I use a VPN daily because without it

• lawnchair_larry 6y ago
  Totally understood for those countries, but it’s still hugely popular in the US. That’s what I’m wondering about.
  • aryonoco 6y ago
    Many ISPs in the US perform DPI, sell anonymized data to marketing companies, slowdown YouTube/Netflix when the backend pipes are congested, etc. If you want your ISP to provide you with a dumb pipe and not interfere with your traffic, a VPN is an easy solution.
    • lawnchair_larry 6y ago
      In practice, you’re almost certainly not getting faster netflix or youtube by adding an extra VPN into the congestion path. There are some weird edge cases where particular peering agreements and anycast routing quirks leave some exceptions to that, but I highly doubt a non-negligible amount of users are actually seeing a consistent speed increase on a VPN, and the vast majority would definitely see a decrease. That VPN is doing more to interfere with traffic than an ISP is. As for tracking you and selling your data, I trust my ISP to behave better in that regard than I do some shady VPN provider. And I don’t even trust my IP that much.
  • fiblye 6y ago
    Biggest real usage I know of, and why people I know use VPNs, is piracy. I've never had my ISP send a letter about anything, but some people I know would get warnings pretty often. Some countries even make it a criminal matter. VPNs help reduce the risk. And there are people who use it for more legal media consumption, like paying for a subscription-based service and the shows/movies they want to see are region locked.