Published: Nov 24, 2023
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.
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 enhanced privacy/security
Average YouTube VPN ad:
“A malicious actor can capture your sensitive data on a public Wi-Fi network”.
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 aren’t guaranteed. 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 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.
Do those sound like privacy friendly platforms?
No of course. You have to attack the root of the problem if you want to make a noticeable impact, the point is: It’s illogical to combat privacy with VPNs, to then use the least privacy friendly platforms.
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 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? Pretty much 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?
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