This is common debate and there’s plenty of angles to it. VPN companies are definitely guilty of fear mongering in their advertising and trying to market them as an easy way to achieve privacy or anonymity, which is false. Tom Scott’s video covers this well. This overview is also pretty good at explaining what it is and isn’t. If you don’t trust your ISP or are using public/free wifi, VPNs can be useful. VPNs aren’t inherently trustworthy either, though, especially free ones that might be harvesting your data. Even a well-intentioned VPN that doesn’t retain logs can rent servers that government entities can (theoretically) bug to get your data (if they really wanted to).
Can you elaborate on the uselessness of a VPN?
This is common debate and there’s plenty of angles to it. VPN companies are definitely guilty of fear mongering in their advertising and trying to market them as an easy way to achieve privacy or anonymity, which is false. Tom Scott’s video covers this well. This overview is also pretty good at explaining what it is and isn’t. If you don’t trust your ISP or are using public/free wifi, VPNs can be useful. VPNs aren’t inherently trustworthy either, though, especially free ones that might be harvesting your data. Even a well-intentioned VPN that doesn’t retain logs can rent servers that government entities can (theoretically) bug to get your data (if they really wanted to).