My #1 concern — I don’t trust my ISP. I don’t trust any of the big ISPs in this country, or any other. The NSA and other government agencies are outsourcing t

My #1 concern — I don’t trust my ISP. I don’t trust any of the big ISPs in this country, or any other. The NSA and other government agencies are outsourcing their spying on domestic people to the ISPs, who are willing to do whatever the government agencies want, in return for large sums of money. The NSA gets what they want, which is to continue to dragnet the entire Internet, both domestically and elsewhere around the world, and yet they are not held responsible for scanning or interdicting any of that data domestically because they’ve outsourced that part of the job. On top of that, the ISPs are doing deep packet inspection and deep packet rewriting to suit their own ends, like serving up the ads of their choice instead of other ads, or serving up the content of their choice (including applying traffic shaping to reduce the quality of that video you watch from a provider that does not have a zero rate agreement with them), or hijacking your DNS packets and sending you to whatever services they want. I have more trust in certain VPN providers, than I do in any of the large ISPs. So, I’m willing to trust them to become my new virtual public endpoint where my traffic is unwrapped and made visible to the rest of the systems on it’s journey around the world. So, yes — I use VPNs. I use VPNs all the time. In fact, my next move is going to be setting up equipment to do whole-house VPNs, so that no traffic can escape my systems that would be visible to my ISP regardless of what kind of deep packet inspection equipment they might have. For me, a VPN is just the next logical step of HTTPS everywhere.