Why you should stop using Commercial VPNs
I watched this video on my homepage and decided to write a post about it.
I agree with everything he says.
It’s not hard to find people on the internet who say VPNs are good for privacy. They are not. They’re hardly ever useful for security either. I will not get too technical as I already shat on VPNs plenty throughout the lore of my blogs, but today I am going to cover more on why you should just ditch VPNs entirely in terms of privacy and security.
It’s important to mention that I am aware of the convenience factors VPNs offer, such as:
- bypassing IP bans
- watching content that is banned in your country
- pirating
- etc.
All of these are great use cases for VPNs. This is not what we are here to discuss. We are discussing why you should save your money on VPNs if your goal is enhance your privacy/security, unless you have your own private hosted VPN.
Do you know those cringy hacker memes? The ones that say things like “Your computer is my 2nd computer”?
That is unironically the situation with VPNs. You’re just routing your traffic to someone’s server.
Isn’t it crazy what a little bit of money and propaganda can do to the world? You can’t even watch a YouTube video without it being sponsored by a VPN. It’s kind of predatory when you think about it. These VPN companies have people who’s job it is to know the technial knowabouts of VPNs, meanwhile misinformation continues to slip through the cracks, causing lies to be spread online. YouTube is the best example.
“VPNs prevent hackers from stealing your data on open WiFi networks!”. Great!!! If some guy on his laptop at your local McDonalds is capturing packets while you browse an HTTP website on your laptop, you can potentially have your data compromised!! I’M SOLD!!!!!! TAKE MY $15!
If VPN providers have to use extremely niche situations that your average person is going to be in 5% of the time to sell their product, then maybe their claim has some unknown truths that you should explore. Am I saying their claim is invalid? Of course not, they’re definitely correct. The point is that it’s laughable how fucking broad it is. Out of all their selling points they could have brainstormed in the office, one of them was “oh BTW that guy wearing a hoodie at your Starbucks with hacker stickers on his computer could be capturing your data so you should give us $15/month..” that is COMICAL.
In their defense, there is not a whole lot of selling points that you can come up with when you’re trying to sell a VPN subscription. This is quite literally the entire point. VPNs only do so much, and you’re better off using other methods instead to increase your privacy and security online.
If you want privacy, security, or both then you should be using something like QubesOS. If you don’t want to go to those extremes, then you should create a privacy/security friendly ecosystem. An example of this includes using Linux, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo. These solutions attack the root of the problem rather than creating a questionably irrelevant workaround that doesn’t even guarantee to solve the issue in the first place. All VPNs are potential honeypots, even the good actors such as Mullvad. This means that simply using a VPN is not enough, and only resolves a laughably small portion of the issues with online privacy/security. With the privacy/security friendly ecosystem discussed above, you are guaranteed to have increased privacy/security and by a very large margin. With VPNs on the other hand, the privacy & most of the security advantages are not guaranteed to be valid, and if they ARE valid, they are extraordinarily small advantages.
True of false:
Billy uses a VPN provider that magically does not keep logs of his traffic and is not a honeypot. Billy FINALLY has privacy!! ….. He now can safely go on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Tiktok.
HMMMMMMM. Do those sound like privacy friendly platforms?
The answer is false. You have to attack the root of the problem if you want to make a noticeable impact, the point is: It’s useless to try to combat the problem by using a VPN for “privacy”, to then turn around and use the least privacy friendly platforms on the planet.
Most people who buy these VPN subscriptions are people rocking laptops running Windows or MacOS, with Google Chrome as their browser, that they then use to access YouTube and so on.
They are still living rent free in the Google/Microsoft/Apple/etc ecosystem. What the fuck is a VPN going to do for your online privacy if you’re using Windows/MacOS, Google Chrome, and accessing sites like Twitter and Tiktok? The answer is nothing.
If you want to have a noticeable impact on your privacy and security, you need to either heavily commit and make a LOT of beneficial changes, or fully commit and go full out paranoid mode. This whole “I’ll just slap on a VPN and I’ll be good” mindset is asinine.
Wanna learn more about VPNs?