VPNs are a scam. You pay money to a company and this unknown company is somehow supposed to be hack proof? Better yet not selling your info anyways? How could you tell? How is it possible for you as a buyer to verify or ensure your privacy? Paying for false peace of mind. Alternatively use Tor Browser (free)... The Tor Project | Privacy & Freedom Online When using tor browser google doesn't have a clue lol There is no such thing as a secure VPN, they centralize and concentrate sensative personal data.
VPN hides your IP and encrypts traffic so that your ISP can't log all of your traffic. I mean they could, but it would be useless. While it's true that a VPN service could steal your data, there are definitely a few reliable services with no logging policies. Tor is an option, but definitely not bullet proof. Exit nodes can be sniffed and reveal a whole lot about your activity online. It is pretty cumbersome to use for most people. If one really wants to know what you are up to, they will find out. Otherwise a good ol' ExpressVPN will do the trick for the vast majority of people. Tunnelbear is another decent option. They will let you test drive it for free up to 500mb, which is good enough to get a feel for it.
I don't think a vpn works well in this day in age, maybe back in 2005. I remember ten years ago they can bypass the VPN and look at your Mac address. Who knows what they do now By they I mean my cousin in middle school. At the time.
MAC address of your router? What's the use in that, really? If someone has access to your network, doesn't really matter if you have a VPN or not. Same way if FBI decided to seize your computer no firewall or anything is going to help. I think it's important to be realistic about what you are trying to hide and what sort of privacy you actually expect. A decent VPN will suffice for 96.4% of the users. For the rest, well they know what they are doing or maybe not... But VPN isn't going to help.
VPNs are less private than TOR, which is free. You're paying money for a false sense of security/privacy. You don't know these companies or where they are located. You know pretty much 0 of who these companies are and how they operate, yet you just gave your credit card information, personal identity, and geographic location to a complete unknown entity because they told you they were more secure than your ISP. Imo it's a scam. You're consolidating sensitive info for them and they charge you for it. What's the difference between your ISP knowing and selling your data compared to a VPN? Nothing. Imo VPNs are like the Bernie Madoff of internet privacy. If you are acessing https sites your Tor exit node is encrypted and anonymous. I agree that Tor is slower, but if privacy is what you're after then Tor is what you want. VPNs are hacked all the time and they could be selling your data to 3rd party or logging your traffic even when they say they aren't due to legalities where the servers are operated. TOR is the workaround to all that, although I will concede that it is slower. NordVPN Admits It Was Hacked Last Year - ExtremeTech " Was NordVPN just an industry anomaly that had a single lapse in judgement? Nope, we came to find out that this vulnerability not only compromised NordVPN, it also exposed others like TorGuard. Now we have a scary trend. There are already a lot of sketchy VPN providers marketing to a consumer base that is still largely unfamiliar with the technology — including those that may be willing to share your data with authoritarian governments. But now even the most “trusted” have proven that they, too, have either lax or downright sloppy protocols in place to mitigate all points of potential attacks. " Recent VPN hacks reveal transparency issues within the industry and its supply chain " Some VPNs claim not to log anything and then still do it anyway. These VPNs may say they don’t store any data logs, but by law must retain connection logs, which might be able to show something about your perfectly normal movements or whereabouts. A big clue is in the nature of the kind of offer a VPN will make to customers. If they enforce connection or download limits on subscriptions, they must be keeping some kind of connection logs. It’s the only way they can manage this. " What can VPNs do with your data? Iranian hackers have been hacking VPN servers to plant backdoors in companies around the world | ZDNet If you don't live in an oppressive country then there really is no reason to use a VPN or TOR imo (as long as you're accessing https sites). As an example some places still prosecute MJ users or growers, so accessing the forums with a TOR or a VPN can then be useful. Alternatively use the "duckduckgo" search engine if you'd like less tracking ect. " DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that puts privacy first and as such it does not store IP addresses, does not log user information, and uses cookies only when required. Gabriel Weinberg, creator of DuckDuckGo, states: "By default, DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information. That is our privacy policy in a nutshell." They maintain logs of all search terms used "though not in a personally identifiable way. " DuckDuckGo - Wikipedia *don't use your real name or any identifying items, ie your phone number ect, if using Tor or your anonymity can be compromised.
Liability and that's a huge difference. Express VPN, for example, is operating out of British Virgin Islands because it's much harder to enforce any litigation against them. These companies are being monitored and audited independently. So I don't know if saying all vpns are a scam is fair. Don't use one, if you don't trust them. I've been using one for years and have not had any issues. Tor isn't for everyone, and as I said before it also has issues. Many times people will use a VPN to download torrents, and that's where Tor isn't that good. It will connect anonymously to the tracker, but p2p is routed directly, thus revealing your address. Not sure if this issue has been addressed recently. The other thing is that Tor is also a network and you have to trust that all the nodes are "safe"... that may not be the case. Rogue Nodes Turn Tor Anonymizer Into Eavesdropper's Paradise If you are doing something where VPN or Tor becomes a concern, probably best to stop it. Whoever needs to know, will eventually find out.
Interesting discussion. VPNs hide not only your private IP address but all your web activity, such as the websites you visit, using encryption. Proxy servers, on the other hand, will only change your IP address, but they won't encrypt your online activities. So, I don't agree with the users who say that VPN is a scam.
It's silly to say that vpn is a scam. First you have to figure out how the vpn system works! There is a downside though. Some vpn apps work really badly, whether they are paid or not. I tried a bunch of different apps, settled on one nordvpn.com/download/windows/ . It's pretty convenient to have it on my computer and on my phone. Now when I go somewhere I don't have to worry about not going to my favorite site or something, lol