commercial VPNs are sus. and israel have been buying up a lot of them.

i trust my ISP and my country's laws more than i trust any of these shady providers which may or may not be tapped by the nsa. and that's a low bar to clear let me tell you.

I strongly believe nobody is entitled to keep a registry of the sites that we visit online. Not the gov, not your ISP, not your carrier. Thats why its essential for me.

A few sites wont load sometimes, which is my only exception to turn it off, and then on again, but its a habit i have gotten used to and its not that much work, given the benefits of an always-on trustworthy VPN.

Very happy with mullvad VPN ,use it mostly for accessing annas archive with is blocked in my country ,thanks to cloudflare

I use Mullvad daily. Never turn it off.

I use a VPN for bittorrent and to access content that's inaccessible in my area. For privacy, I use Tor. Most the time, I don't use a a VPN or Tor at all. I might start using a VPN all the time with how bad surveillance is getting. I trust my VPN more than my ISP being able to see every IP I exchange data with.

I don’t think most ppl need a vpn for at home stuff but I do use Mullvad since I spend a lot of time on college WiFi and they might not like how I access my textbooks and research papers.

I connect to my home network via VPN if I'm out and about. There's no additional cost, but I feel more secure in a public wifi and have access to all my internal services as I'm used to.

It's become a critical aspect of my online experience. I currently use Mullvad since leaving PIA. Mullvad seems to suffer from being too popular for it's own good. An Increasing amount of websites are trying to identify and block traffic coming from VPN servers, sites like Kroger.com, USPS.com, Reddit. I never previously had this much trouble on PIA, but maybe it's just that the times are a changing. I may search for alternative VPN when my service is up with Mullvad, though. I definitely don't like the idea of using the internet without a VPN anymore.

VPN's are like a condom for the internet. With much of the internet trying to fuck you putting on a wrapper is probably a good idea.

Eventually you get used to the slower speeds, rarely have issues with connection and if I do I just change IP. If a website doesn't allow a vpn I really don't need to go there and for the sites that I do want to visit there are optional different front ends I use.

A vpn and a good add blocker is pretty much a necessity for me at this point.

It's not cost effective to lose your privacy, you've merely haven't realized you've been paying all along. Also you are the product being sold.

Unfortunately I live in a country where they once banned whole google drive because someone was sharing a pirated movie through it. And just recently they banned proton mail because someone used proton mail to blackmail some one else. OK I don't condone second one but still would they have banned gmail if those idiots had used that. Yeah I know I don't need a VPN I need a new government but till then a VPN and Tor is all I have

I'd like to not get doxxed (made mistake of befriending some one in the past who I find out years later mighta doxxed some one for drama I had nothing to do with (infact , was already excised from that friend group by that point)) , tho not sure how well VPNs protect against online (stalk|identity correlat)ing by random internet users

The only VPN I use is:

Wireguard and OpenVPN to connect to my home network.

AirVPN for a server that I may or may not have on my home network that may or may not be sailing the high seas (allegedly).

Super duper important. I won't run my network without one. So if we ever get to a point where a VPN is prohibited by law, I will unplug and go work on some of my other hobbies like creating bonsai. Any no, I don't run the 'arr stack, I'm not a hacker, nor do I torrent. I just prefer the absolute minimum number of people knowing who I am or what I'm doing. I'm that way irl.

sometimes slower speed.

Indeed, anything you put between you and your target will slow speeds, especially if you're running everything through a double hop Shadowsocks proxy. That is the trade off. All technology wields a double edged sword. Additionally, you will encounter more captcha than normal, tho 99% of what I see are Cloudflare verification. Again, yet another trade off. You might even be precluded from accessing some websites. Me personally, I'll accept the captcha/verification, slower speeds, and occasional site blocks, for security, privacy and anonymity. Also, in regards to sites blocking a VPN ip, it's not a common occurrence on my network, but when it does happen, I find that the information contained on the blocked site, is freely available somewhere else.

it all depends what you do, the average person honestly does not need a VPN, is it still "nice"? sure, getting over streaming restrictions or getting cheaper flights, and if you desire to sail the seas to any degree than also yeah get a VPN, and ofc, getting over porn bans

absolutely crucial. All my devices are always connected through a VPN, and usually I try to route my traffic through a different country. When your country is paying for a service to monitor citizen's internet traffic, anonymity is worth paying for.

Very important, and becoming more important by the day as more and more regions agegate the internet. You need to change regions so you can access sites without guaranteed identity theft.

If you don't use one, it's fairly trivial to link your activity across the internet, as well as trace any internet traffic back to you, personally.

Connectivity is certainly a problem. For the most part, if they block my access, then I consider them not worth visiting.

Over the past few years, there has been a great increase in websites using geoblocking. Half the local news sites in the USA block traffic from the EU for example, likely because they want to inject 300 advertising trackers in a manner that would violate EU law. I've been using Mullvad for years, and I am happy with it.

Sometimes lemmy.world blocks me from posting from it, which I am not happy with. They were even critical of its strict privacy stance, which I found to be a weird take from a fediverse project.

I'm doubtful it does much in most cases due to browser fingerprinting, but I still use it and it sometimes can be useful to get around geo issues, plus it's just a bit more privacy to stack on top of the measures I'm already taking, so for the price I feel like it's worth it.

10/10

If you've never lived in a place where you complain about having speeds being throttled, then 2 guys come to your house with a full color printout of your internet use over the last few months, then walk around looking at everything you have and basically asking for a bribe just becaise, then you haven't fully understood the use case "masking traffic from your ISP."

I have 2 that I use regularly. PIA to unblock things on the internet (and change how things are logged) and Tailscale to access my home network remotely. I'm happy with both of them.

My house has 2 other units and we all share one network. Without a VPN, my neighbors could see all my network traffic. I don't think they know or care how to do that but it's enough to keep me on a VPN at all times.

I guess this really depends on the country you're sourcing from.

I use it everyday, so it's very important.

Australia is prepping for that social media ban in December (and maybe the UK porn ban too). Have 'been in' New Zealand ever since that news came out