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I’m may be dumb wrt this but i really don’t get the VPN business. Why so much advertising for VPNs in particular? Looking at why someone would want to use a VP

I’m may be dumb wrt this but i really don’t get the VPN business. Why so much advertising for VPNs in particular? Looking at why someone would want to use a VPN: - Protection from governments or big businesses: you probably do actual research, not listen to some ad by your favorite gamer - Protection from scummy ad tracking: Most people still do some research here albeit less carefully. But again, if you’re worried about ad tracking, wouldn’t you worry about a VPN aggressively advertising themselves? - Access region-locked content: Any VPN works here. This could explain some of the advertising. But still, most VPNs talk a lot about security, and only a small section on region switching. I would imagine if this was the main target audience VPN advertisements would be different. Are people so gullible that they see an ad for NordVPN, think “oh shit I need to protect my security”, and then buy NordVPN, without questioning at all if it’s worth the money, if there’s an alternative, or why NordVPN advertises on XxGamerClipz? So much that NordVPN makes money off of its ads? And if so, why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people?

jayski 5y ago
i think a vast majority of it is people who want to stream content, pirate torrents, etc, without getting a strike letter from their ISP
- Hidios 5y ago
  > i think a vast majority of it is people who want to stream content, pirate torrents, etc, without getting a strike letter from their ISP This use case is definitely very underrated, people usually associate VPNs with higher latency but if your ISP has bad peering to certain locations, which many of them do, a good VPN can do wonders.
  - dtx1 5y ago
    I've got another: I don't get a real IPv4 adress from my provider it's all carrier nat on IPv4. On IPv6 I get a direct connection though. The carrier nat is often slow and and I cant forward IPv4 ports. Using mullvad via IPv6 and IPv6 NAT on my router I can route around the carrier and get much better IPv4 Bandwidth and Peering at the cost of a a worse latency (though it goes from 7 to 25ms for the average game) so it's hardly an Issue. That and I can pirate as much as I want with it in germany.
everdrive 5y ago
>Protection from scummy ad tracking: Most people still do some research here albeit less carefully. But again, if you’re worried about ad tracking, wouldn’t you worry about a VPN aggressively advertising themselves? Importantly, most advertising and tracking does not care what your IP address is, and so a VPN does nothing here unless you can separate your cookies / hardware profile / etc.
pydry 5y ago
>Are people so gullible Yes? I think theyre usually riding off the trust of the content creators they advertise with. >And if so, why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people? NordVPN arent the only ones.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  I watch many, many youtubers... there are probably only two or three that i trust with their reviews, and none of ther reviews are sponsored.
saurik 5y ago
> Access region-locked content: Any VPN works here. This could explain some of the advertising. Actually, most of the time your VPN is just going to be blocked entirely by the service: they have a limited pool of IP addresses being shared by users, so the patterns of access of users randomly popping up on their addresses makes even automated bans pretty easy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143238 To really get this right requires crazy tricks like taking all of the traffic destined for a service and routing it to per-user stable addresses that you cycle much more slowly. NordVPN seems to do this with Disney+, for example. There was a great analysis of this done (but to get it you will need to use an archive site as the author mysteriously deleted it). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 The result is that users trying to do this tend to have to keep using different VPN services until they find a server on one that actually works today, and probably in the process keep accumulating subscriptions to "too many" VPN services for "too long". A lot of random review sites are then just claiming to tell you which service is best able to access such content at any time (but honestly, it is a losing battle: there is no obvious way to win this in the long term).
- Tenoke 5y ago
  >Actually, most of the time your VPN is just going to be blocked entirely by the service Doesn't seem to be the case 'most of the time' for non-free VPNs or at least mine. You can definitely access YouTube videos available abroad or BBC iPlayer or whatever. I'm on VPN a 3rd of the time and it's only very occasionally I have issues. Sure, maybe it's worse with some services but not 'most of the time'.
  - eptcyka 5y ago
    Yep, but Amazon for instance blocks first party content when accessing it via a VPN. Some delivery services block my VPN outright.
  - saurik 5y ago
    I am doing an implied integral here over over all random VPN services and servers, as the person I am replying to said that "any" VPN would work. If you have found one that seems to consistently work for the BBC--and based on their efforts against Disney+, I bet NordVPN would work?--you are now a single data point: if you search for BBC blocked VPN on Google, however, you will see that it is an extremely common issue that the BBC blacklists VPNs from accessing their service. (FWIW, I could accept an argument that I am not "weighting" my certainly-informal statement well on actual usage figures: if NordVPN and ExpressVPN are even the only two VPNs that work well against the BBC, maybe they are alone a considerable percentage of the market. I am pushing back on the idea that "any" VPN would work, and so I am looking more at the idea of choosing a random brand, equally weighted.)
Pmop 5y ago
I use it mainly because my ISP does traffic shaping, videos and images load painfully slow on a full duplex half gigabit fiber connection. We do have a law that makes traffic shaping illegal, but it's not enforced, so the only way around it is to use a VPN.
- godelski 5y ago
  Funny enough my DnD group has found that we get fewer Zoom drops when we all turn on our VPNs. It is odd that in the age of video conferencing that video conferencing would be unstable due to... presumably the ISP.
michaelt 5y ago
VPNs, much like gas stations, are selling an almost indistinguishable product. Essentially every VPN is fast enough, and secure enough in its selection of software. The only differences are: * Undetectable things (they say they don't keep logs, but do they really not keep logs?) * Price - which they don't want to compete on if they can avoid it * Reputation - which advertising can buy you a simulacrum of Some VPN companies have decided the way they're going to stand out in the sea of very similar looking options is by being the company whose name you recognise.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  I've tried a few VPNs and they are pretty distinguishable. Some offer more countries, some higher speeds, some rotate IPs more often etc.
- brighton36 5y ago
  Great comment.
- this_user 5y ago
  "Secure enough" depends on your threat model. Many VPNs were poorly configured in the past and were leaking information. Only a few (like IVPN) were doing a proper job and had that verified by a third-party audit. The next big question is jurisdiction. I would never trust a VPN that is based in the US, UK or a similar country where government access is virtually a given.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  Torrent speeds differ by orders of magnitude for several VPNs I have tried. Won't tell which ones, sorry)
xvector 5y ago
It's for protection from ISPs.
- legrande 5y ago
  > It's for protection from ISPs. Insofar as there are shitty ISPs that sell your data, yes. Most ISPs don't though. Also: I trust a VPN based in Gibraltar more than an ISP which is known to sell your data.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    In North America at least, your ISP will happily comply with copyright notices and threats of lawsuits and pass them along.
  - ric2b 5y ago
    Gibraltar is a British territory under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United Kingdom, not much different from the US.
  - elithrar 5y ago
    > Most ISPs don't though. You sure? ISPs can, and do, this fairly readily. They wiggle on what “your data is” (“CPNI”) but browsing history via DNS queries is not uncommon (and cheap, to boot). Go read Spectrum’s policy and how they wiggle around it as just one example: https://www.spectrum.com/policies/your-privacy-rights-opt-out?cid=sms:PrivacyOptOut https://www.spectrum.com/policies/your-privacy-rights-opt-ou...
vkou 5y ago
There is one other use case that is rare, but the one I needed. Sue to shitty peering, and some bad connection between me and a service, I was seeing horrific latency and packet loss. A VPN let me route my packets through Chicago, which had a better connection to the service in question.
chaz6 5y ago
I just do not understand it either. When I want some protection I use tor. I would never trust a paid vpn service.
- xvector 5y ago
  To play the devil's advocate, does a volunteer have more incentive to keep your data private, or a company whose very business and reputation relies on keeping it private? Is a network that can readily and easily be infiltrated by malicious parties "for free" more trustworthy, or a private network locked down to trusted machines by security engineers, audited by third parties? Because there is enormous incentive to deanonymize Tor. In 2020, nearly 25% of the network was controlled by a malicious attacker. [1] You had, then, a 1.5% chance of complete and total deanonymization by a single party - a near-certain chance of deanonymization if you heavily used Tor. And this is without any traffic correlation antics. Turning off the devil's advocate, most "trustworthy" VPNs are almost certainly intelligence gathering operations, claiming "no logs" in court but in reality being a tool for parallel construction. It's too valuable a position for the 3LAs of the world to not have some ownership and stake in major VPNs. Crypto AG-style. IMHO there is no hope for modern anonymity. Interesting connections will be logged for future deanonymization with quantum computers. In the meantime, mixnets like Nym [2] might emerge to be our saving grace. [1]: https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/why-tor-is-bad-for-your-privacy-and-security/ https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/why-tor-is-bad-for-... [2]: https://nymtech.net/ https://nymtech.net/
Hamuko 5y ago
>And if so, why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people? I see ExpressVPN ads all the time and they're almost always advertised as "protecting yourself from hackers or your ISP".
legrande 5y ago
> Are people so gullible that they see an ad for NordVPN, think “oh shit I need to protect my security”, and then buy NordVPN Well not the people serious about VPNs. The ones I consistently see popup in online discussions about what VPNs to use are Mullvad, ProtonVPN (Because of their Switzerland location), & iVPN (because they're based in a non fourteen-eyes jurisdiction, namely Gibraltar). Of course jurisdiction doesn't matter since the point-of-presence of the particular VPN country is usually housed in some cheap colocation datacenter that could have questionable ethics and could be feeding logs to adversaries, without the VPN provider even knowing. Then there's the whole 'we never keep logs' claim which can't be proven. So, caveat emptor folks!
- ohdannyboy 5y ago
  Then there's the whole 'we never keep logs' claim which can't be proven. So, caveat emptor folks! It can be trusted with a fair degree of certainty depending on the company. For instance, we know that PIA at the very least was willing to testify under oath that they had no records to provide the US government. Could they be keeping secret logs or have changed practices since? Sure, but at some point the claim seems credible. Now those flavor-of-the-month budget VPNs that cannot possibly be profitable unless you're the product? Different story.
  - bennysomething 5y ago
    i thought pia got bought recently by a much less trust worthy vpn?
    - ohdannyboy 5y ago
      Huh, looks like it was. That would make me apprehensive about continuing to trust them.
      - xvector 5y ago
        They were bought by Kape Technologies, an Israeli surveillance firm whose founders have ties to Unit 8200. PIA literally couldn't up a bigger red flag if they tried.
vehemenz 5y ago
It's a bit weird that you omit the main reason for VPNs—avoiding dumb copyright strikes from your ISP when torrenting. To be fair this is a US-only reason. Maybe you live in Bulgaria or Finland.
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  It's a thing in other European countries too.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Finland certainly has it's fair share of stories, including them taking your equipment and holding it for lengthy times. We even have our own legal firms specialising in fun letters...
api 5y ago
VPNs are cheap to run snake oil that you can sell to people who don’t really understand security. Snake oil in general is a great business.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
I live in Germany but don't speak (or read) German. Almost all internet sites completely ignore my browser's "preferred language" preference and serve me content in German because I have a German IP address. So I use a VPN to pretend I'm in the UK, and get English language. I actually have to turn this off to watch streaming services, because they detect it too easily. The streaming services then cheerfully serve me English UI (because my account preference is for English) but German language content. I understand why, but this is such bullshit. If you want people to stop using VPN's, then stop assuming that their IP address has anything to do with their physical location, culture, language, bank account region, home address, telephone prefix or anything else.
- forty 5y ago
  I lived a bit in Sweden, and got the opposite frustration: everything was in English. Even people would see I'm not swedish and speak to me in English. How was I supposed to learn swedish without ever hearing any swedish? (I did have lessons, but it takes much more time to learn with lessons only)
  - marcus_holmes 5y ago
    I'm having the same problem learning German in Berlin - everyone speaks English here and the slightest mispronunciation or "vie bitte?" and they switch to English. Which is appreciated - I'm a foreigner in their country and they're being incredibly hospitable to speak my language - but it makes practising German very difficult. Also, a Swedish distant relative of mine told me (decades ago) "We Swedes prefer to talk to foreigners in their own language, and keep Swedish as a private language for ourselves". I've never heard that said by anyone else, but it has always stuck with me as a cool idea, and the antithesis of the English ;)
- kevincox 5y ago
  > stop assuming that their IP address has anything to do with their physical location, culture, language, bank account region, home address, telephone prefix or anything else. The unfortunate truth is that analytics have show that more users have their browsers configured than an IP that doesn't "match" a language that they understand. Very unfortunately but is basically the common case for browser defaults on the internet.
Spooky23 5y ago
It seems like a throwback to the naive old internet. Being that it is 2021, it seems absurd to actually believe that some cheap service provider is providing any kind of meaningful privacy. I get the notion of being able to watch BBC or avoid baseball blackouts, but competent content providers block VPNs all of the time… consolidating will only help that effort.
jcrawfordor 5y ago
The simple answer is that VPN services are really pretty easy to stand up. There is an enormous menu of VPN services out there, and many of them are basically some slapped-together Ansible playbooks and machines in sketchy datacenters. Running a VPN service is actually advantageous in this regard, because you can place a lot of your infrastructure in the cheapest DC markets and it almost comes off as a feature (look at all those global PoPs!). And now more and more VPN services allow resellers, so you don't even need the Ansible playbooks... you can just sign up to resell. It's basically the 2010s version of web hosting in that regard, an industry that absolutely proliferated with tiny companies that were ultimately just reselling larger providers or running their own infrastructure very shoddily. It was seen as easy money, and that was true to an extent until they proliferated so much that it was hard to grab many customers... which lead to some very heavy-handed advertising pushes. Consider, for example, the large number of Usenet providers that have affiliated VPN services now... they're priced so cheap it's hard to imagine them making much money off of them, but consider that they're just reselling from a larger Usenet provider that already has a lot of owned capacity and bandwidth. Since Usenet is so storage heavy they may just run the VPN endpoints right on their NNTP servers. It's basically free for them to offer!
blunte 5y ago
They sell fear (with some justification), and then they sell an underperforming product that supposedly addresses that concern. It would seem that people do [think “oh shit I need to protect my security”, and then buy NordVPN, without questioning ...] or else they would have stopped all that advertising. There's some truth to the fear they are promoting in some situations. I doubt most consumers are in those situations (ignoring people living under oppressive regimes, as presumably they aren't watching the typical consumer tech videos on Youtube). But like a lot of types of insurance, the consumers are convinced that they need the solution to the problem which they don't really have.
bitexploder 5y ago
I use a VPN purely for torrents. Have a VM with a torrent downloading server. Only way that VM can route beyond the local net is they a static VPN address and the VPN interface. No VPN connection means no internet leakage.
throwaway984393 5y ago
> why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people? This is the interesting question. I think mostly it's the (correct) fear most businesspeople have of being caught taking advantage of rubes. They fear the social stigma, the impact to their business reputation, and potential litigation. It's the ones willing to take on all this additional risk that go on to rake in cash selling snake oil and magnetic holistic government-grade encryption bracelets.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
I first installed a VPN after receiving a menacing letter from my ISP for torrenting. Then I moved to a country that doesn't care about torrents, but where I could be jailed for liking a wrong facebook post. Still, I don't want G$$gle & Co. to know everything about me. I travel a lot and do fear the wi-fi MITM. So I use a VPN.
Unklejoe 5y ago
I always figured the main reason people used VPNs was to be able to pirate movies and music without getting those letters from their ISP and that all the other reasons were just plausible deniability points.

jayski 5y ago

i think a vast majority of it is people who want to stream content, pirate torrents, etc, without getting a strike letter from their ISP

Hidios 5y ago
> i think a vast majority of it is people who want to stream content, pirate torrents, etc, without getting a strike letter from their ISP This use case is definitely very underrated, people usually associate VPNs with higher latency but if your ISP has bad peering to certain locations, which many of them do, a good VPN can do wonders.
- dtx1 5y ago
  I've got another: I don't get a real IPv4 adress from my provider it's all carrier nat on IPv4. On IPv6 I get a direct connection though. The carrier nat is often slow and and I cant forward IPv4 ports. Using mullvad via IPv6 and IPv6 NAT on my router I can route around the carrier and get much better IPv4 Bandwidth and Peering at the cost of a a worse latency (though it goes from 7 to 25ms for the average game) so it's hardly an Issue. That and I can pirate as much as I want with it in germany.

everdrive 5y ago

>Protection from scummy ad tracking: Most people still do some research here albeit less carefully. But again, if you’re worried about ad tracking, wouldn’t you worry about a VPN aggressively advertising themselves? Importantly, most advertising and tracking does not care what your IP address is, and so a VPN does nothing here unless you can separate your cookies / hardware profile / etc.

pydry 5y ago

>Are people so gullible Yes? I think theyre usually riding off the trust of the content creators they advertise with. >And if so, why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people? NordVPN arent the only ones.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
I watch many, many youtubers... there are probably only two or three that i trust with their reviews, and none of ther reviews are sponsored.

saurik 5y ago

> Access region-locked content: Any VPN works here. This could explain some of the advertising. Actually, most of the time your VPN is just going to be blocked entirely by the service: they have a limited pool of IP addresses being shared by users, so the patterns of access of users randomly popping up on their addresses makes even automated bans pretty easy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143238 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28143238 To really get this right requires crazy tricks like taking all of the traffic destined for a service and routing it to per-user stable addresses that you cycle much more slowly. NordVPN seems to do this with Disney+, for example. There was a great analysis of this done (but to get it you will need to use an archive site as the author mysteriously deleted it). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21664692 The result is that users trying to do this tend to have to keep using different VPN services until they find a server on one that actually works today, and probably in the process keep accumulating subscriptions to "too many" VPN services for "too long". A lot of random review sites are then just claiming to tell you which service is best able to access such content at any time (but honestly, it is a losing battle: there is no obvious way to win this in the long term).

Tenoke 5y ago
>Actually, most of the time your VPN is just going to be blocked entirely by the service Doesn't seem to be the case 'most of the time' for non-free VPNs or at least mine. You can definitely access YouTube videos available abroad or BBC iPlayer or whatever. I'm on VPN a 3rd of the time and it's only very occasionally I have issues. Sure, maybe it's worse with some services but not 'most of the time'.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  Yep, but Amazon for instance blocks first party content when accessing it via a VPN. Some delivery services block my VPN outright.
- saurik 5y ago
  I am doing an implied integral here over over all random VPN services and servers, as the person I am replying to said that "any" VPN would work. If you have found one that seems to consistently work for the BBC--and based on their efforts against Disney+, I bet NordVPN would work?--you are now a single data point: if you search for BBC blocked VPN on Google, however, you will see that it is an extremely common issue that the BBC blacklists VPNs from accessing their service. (FWIW, I could accept an argument that I am not "weighting" my certainly-informal statement well on actual usage figures: if NordVPN and ExpressVPN are even the only two VPNs that work well against the BBC, maybe they are alone a considerable percentage of the market. I am pushing back on the idea that "any" VPN would work, and so I am looking more at the idea of choosing a random brand, equally weighted.)

Pmop 5y ago

I use it mainly because my ISP does traffic shaping, videos and images load painfully slow on a full duplex half gigabit fiber connection. We do have a law that makes traffic shaping illegal, but it's not enforced, so the only way around it is to use a VPN.

godelski 5y ago
Funny enough my DnD group has found that we get fewer Zoom drops when we all turn on our VPNs. It is odd that in the age of video conferencing that video conferencing would be unstable due to... presumably the ISP.

michaelt 5y ago

VPNs, much like gas stations, are selling an almost indistinguishable product. Essentially every VPN is fast enough, and secure enough in its selection of software. The only differences are: * Undetectable things (they say they don't keep logs, but do they really not keep logs?) * Price - which they don't want to compete on if they can avoid it * Reputation - which advertising can buy you a simulacrum of Some VPN companies have decided the way they're going to stand out in the sea of very similar looking options is by being the company whose name you recognise.

Tenoke 5y ago
I've tried a few VPNs and they are pretty distinguishable. Some offer more countries, some higher speeds, some rotate IPs more often etc.
brighton36 5y ago
Great comment.
this_user 5y ago
"Secure enough" depends on your threat model. Many VPNs were poorly configured in the past and were leaking information. Only a few (like IVPN) were doing a proper job and had that verified by a third-party audit. The next big question is jurisdiction. I would never trust a VPN that is based in the US, UK or a similar country where government access is virtually a given.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
Torrent speeds differ by orders of magnitude for several VPNs I have tried. Won't tell which ones, sorry)

xvector 5y ago

It's for protection from ISPs.

legrande 5y ago
> It's for protection from ISPs. Insofar as there are shitty ISPs that sell your data, yes. Most ISPs don't though. Also: I trust a VPN based in Gibraltar more than an ISP which is known to sell your data.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  In North America at least, your ISP will happily comply with copyright notices and threats of lawsuits and pass them along.
- ric2b 5y ago
  Gibraltar is a British territory under the jurisdiction and sovereignty of the United Kingdom, not much different from the US.
- elithrar 5y ago
  > Most ISPs don't though. You sure? ISPs can, and do, this fairly readily. They wiggle on what “your data is” (“CPNI”) but browsing history via DNS queries is not uncommon (and cheap, to boot). Go read Spectrum’s policy and how they wiggle around it as just one example: https://www.spectrum.com/policies/your-privacy-rights-opt-out?cid=sms:PrivacyOptOut https://www.spectrum.com/policies/your-privacy-rights-opt-ou...

vkou 5y ago

There is one other use case that is rare, but the one I needed. Sue to shitty peering, and some bad connection between me and a service, I was seeing horrific latency and packet loss. A VPN let me route my packets through Chicago, which had a better connection to the service in question.

chaz6 5y ago

I just do not understand it either. When I want some protection I use tor. I would never trust a paid vpn service.

xvector 5y ago
To play the devil's advocate, does a volunteer have more incentive to keep your data private, or a company whose very business and reputation relies on keeping it private? Is a network that can readily and easily be infiltrated by malicious parties "for free" more trustworthy, or a private network locked down to trusted machines by security engineers, audited by third parties? Because there is enormous incentive to deanonymize Tor. In 2020, nearly 25% of the network was controlled by a malicious attacker. [1] You had, then, a 1.5% chance of complete and total deanonymization by a single party - a near-certain chance of deanonymization if you heavily used Tor. And this is without any traffic correlation antics. Turning off the devil's advocate, most "trustworthy" VPNs are almost certainly intelligence gathering operations, claiming "no logs" in court but in reality being a tool for parallel construction. It's too valuable a position for the 3LAs of the world to not have some ownership and stake in major VPNs. Crypto AG-style. IMHO there is no hope for modern anonymity. Interesting connections will be logged for future deanonymization with quantum computers. In the meantime, mixnets like Nym [2] might emerge to be our saving grace. [1]: https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/why-tor-is-bad-for-your-privacy-and-security/ https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/why-tor-is-bad-for-... [2]: https://nymtech.net/ https://nymtech.net/

Hamuko 5y ago

>And if so, why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people? I see ExpressVPN ads all the time and they're almost always advertised as "protecting yourself from hackers or your ISP".

legrande 5y ago

> Are people so gullible that they see an ad for NordVPN, think “oh shit I need to protect my security”, and then buy NordVPN Well not the people serious about VPNs. The ones I consistently see popup in online discussions about what VPNs to use are Mullvad, ProtonVPN (Because of their Switzerland location), & iVPN (because they're based in a non fourteen-eyes jurisdiction, namely Gibraltar). Of course jurisdiction doesn't matter since the point-of-presence of the particular VPN country is usually housed in some cheap colocation datacenter that could have questionable ethics and could be feeding logs to adversaries, without the VPN provider even knowing. Then there's the whole 'we never keep logs' claim which can't be proven. So, caveat emptor folks!

ohdannyboy 5y ago
Then there's the whole 'we never keep logs' claim which can't be proven. So, caveat emptor folks! It can be trusted with a fair degree of certainty depending on the company. For instance, we know that PIA at the very least was willing to testify under oath that they had no records to provide the US government. Could they be keeping secret logs or have changed practices since? Sure, but at some point the claim seems credible. Now those flavor-of-the-month budget VPNs that cannot possibly be profitable unless you're the product? Different story.
- bennysomething 5y ago
  i thought pia got bought recently by a much less trust worthy vpn?
  - ohdannyboy 5y ago
    Huh, looks like it was. That would make me apprehensive about continuing to trust them.
    - xvector 5y ago
      They were bought by Kape Technologies, an Israeli surveillance firm whose founders have ties to Unit 8200. PIA literally couldn't up a bigger red flag if they tried.

vehemenz 5y ago

It's a bit weird that you omit the main reason for VPNs—avoiding dumb copyright strikes from your ISP when torrenting. To be fair this is a US-only reason. Maybe you live in Bulgaria or Finland.

selfhoster11 5y ago
It's a thing in other European countries too.
Ekaros 5y ago
Finland certainly has it's fair share of stories, including them taking your equipment and holding it for lengthy times. We even have our own legal firms specialising in fun letters...

api 5y ago

VPNs are cheap to run snake oil that you can sell to people who don’t really understand security. Snake oil in general is a great business.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

I live in Germany but don't speak (or read) German. Almost all internet sites completely ignore my browser's "preferred language" preference and serve me content in German because I have a German IP address. So I use a VPN to pretend I'm in the UK, and get English language. I actually have to turn this off to watch streaming services, because they detect it too easily. The streaming services then cheerfully serve me English UI (because my account preference is for English) but German language content. I understand why, but this is such bullshit. If you want people to stop using VPN's, then stop assuming that their IP address has anything to do with their physical location, culture, language, bank account region, home address, telephone prefix or anything else.

forty 5y ago
I lived a bit in Sweden, and got the opposite frustration: everything was in English. Even people would see I'm not swedish and speak to me in English. How was I supposed to learn swedish without ever hearing any swedish? (I did have lessons, but it takes much more time to learn with lessons only)
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  I'm having the same problem learning German in Berlin - everyone speaks English here and the slightest mispronunciation or "vie bitte?" and they switch to English. Which is appreciated - I'm a foreigner in their country and they're being incredibly hospitable to speak my language - but it makes practising German very difficult. Also, a Swedish distant relative of mine told me (decades ago) "We Swedes prefer to talk to foreigners in their own language, and keep Swedish as a private language for ourselves". I've never heard that said by anyone else, but it has always stuck with me as a cool idea, and the antithesis of the English ;)
kevincox 5y ago
> stop assuming that their IP address has anything to do with their physical location, culture, language, bank account region, home address, telephone prefix or anything else. The unfortunate truth is that analytics have show that more users have their browsers configured than an IP that doesn't "match" a language that they understand. Very unfortunately but is basically the common case for browser defaults on the internet.

Spooky23 5y ago

It seems like a throwback to the naive old internet. Being that it is 2021, it seems absurd to actually believe that some cheap service provider is providing any kind of meaningful privacy. I get the notion of being able to watch BBC or avoid baseball blackouts, but competent content providers block VPNs all of the time… consolidating will only help that effort.

jcrawfordor 5y ago

The simple answer is that VPN services are really pretty easy to stand up. There is an enormous menu of VPN services out there, and many of them are basically some slapped-together Ansible playbooks and machines in sketchy datacenters. Running a VPN service is actually advantageous in this regard, because you can place a lot of your infrastructure in the cheapest DC markets and it almost comes off as a feature (look at all those global PoPs!). And now more and more VPN services allow resellers, so you don't even need the Ansible playbooks... you can just sign up to resell. It's basically the 2010s version of web hosting in that regard, an industry that absolutely proliferated with tiny companies that were ultimately just reselling larger providers or running their own infrastructure very shoddily. It was seen as easy money, and that was true to an extent until they proliferated so much that it was hard to grab many customers... which lead to some very heavy-handed advertising pushes. Consider, for example, the large number of Usenet providers that have affiliated VPN services now... they're priced so cheap it's hard to imagine them making much money off of them, but consider that they're just reselling from a larger Usenet provider that already has a lot of owned capacity and bandwidth. Since Usenet is so storage heavy they may just run the VPN endpoints right on their NNTP servers. It's basically free for them to offer!

blunte 5y ago

They sell fear (with some justification), and then they sell an underperforming product that supposedly addresses that concern. It would seem that people do [think “oh shit I need to protect my security”, and then buy NordVPN, without questioning ...] or else they would have stopped all that advertising. There's some truth to the fear they are promoting in some situations. I doubt most consumers are in those situations (ignoring people living under oppressive regimes, as presumably they aren't watching the typical consumer tech videos on Youtube). But like a lot of types of insurance, the consumers are convinced that they need the solution to the problem which they don't really have.

bitexploder 5y ago

I use a VPN purely for torrents. Have a VM with a torrent downloading server. Only way that VM can route beyond the local net is they a static VPN address and the VPN interface. No VPN connection means no internet leakage.

throwaway984393 5y ago

> why don’t other companies do this that could better target dumb people? This is the interesting question. I think mostly it's the (correct) fear most businesspeople have of being caught taking advantage of rubes. They fear the social stigma, the impact to their business reputation, and potential litigation. It's the ones willing to take on all this additional risk that go on to rake in cash selling snake oil and magnetic holistic government-grade encryption bracelets.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

I first installed a VPN after receiving a menacing letter from my ISP for torrenting. Then I moved to a country that doesn't care about torrents, but where I could be jailed for liking a wrong facebook post. Still, I don't want G$$gle & Co. to know everything about me. I travel a lot and do fear the wi-fi MITM. So I use a VPN.

Unklejoe 5y ago

I always figured the main reason people used VPNs was to be able to pirate movies and music without getting those letters from their ISP and that all the other reasons were just plausible deniability points.