Hm, I think this is mainly an form of advertisement move to compel more users to use edge/not switch away from it. Reason: By now many non-technical people thi

Hm, I think this is mainly an form of advertisement move to compel more users to use edge/not switch away from it. Reason: By now many non-technical people think a VPN is necessary (or at least recommendable) for "safety". Through how a VPN actually helps/works most non-technical people do not understand at all. For Microsoft providing a VPN which by default is only enabled on public WiFi and similar isn't too expensive. They also need to compete with Apples Privacy Relay feature. So putting bias aside it seems a good thing. But there are some gotchas: 1. a VPN is not per-se privacy protecting, it is only that if the VPN provider legally binding agrees to not sell out the users data. 2. a major browser which tries to force itself on all windows users providing a VPN for free hurt the VPN market due to the unfair competitive advantage this VPN has. 3. It could normalize for many people that VPNs do not necessary have a feature to avoid geo-blocking => make it easier for legislation targeting such features to pass 4. also more centralization for cloudflair Through if you ignore all this from a pure "common peoples security" perspective (i.e. not state actor attacks) this is an neat improvement. There are still to many things which allow attacks due to not using HTTPS and for non state-level attackers the best attack vector are public hotspots and similar where this VPN automatically is enabled. E.g. common security problem is HTTP(not s) redirect links in e.g. mails, which an attacker could trivially rewrite to point you to their site which automatically proxies the site you originally wanted to go to. Worst offender I saw was a FIN-tec site using emailing http(not s) redirect links containing the auth token for the initial account setup...