this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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Good it should be as what VPNs claim they do is fucking stupid. And if people are dumb enough to think that blocking their IP protects them from tracking then they I don't know let them spend money on a VPN. I mean tracking IPs hasn't been reliable in a long time.
The 'VPNs don't protect you' take is technically correct but misses the actual story here. The UK ASA didn't ban a VPN because it doesn't work — they banned an ad for a legal privacy product because the ad criticized surveillance. That's a different thing entirely.
The precedent being set isn't about VPN efficacy. It's about whether a company can run advertising that frames government surveillance as something consumers should be concerned about. The UK has been pushing mandatory VPN identity verification, client-side scanning proposals, and Apple backdoor demands. Banning an ad that says 'and then?' about that trajectory is regulatory pressure on the message, not the product.
Whether VPNs are a magic bullet is a separate conversation.