a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
freehunter  ·  3432 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: VPN - To use or not to use, that's the question

The best use case that everyone could consider righteous is to protect your information while you're connected to wifi that you do not control. If I'm at Starbucks, there is a greater-than-zero chance that someone could be sniffing my traffic. There is a greater-than-zero chance that someone could put up a false hotspot and read all of my traffic, read my passwords, read my email. If I'm on someone else's wifi connection, I fire up my VPN as it encrypts all traffic as it's going through.

Another good example is if you're on an Internet connection where your ISP plays with the traffic. For example, if your ISP throttles YouTube videos. Running through a VPN, they would never know what site you're on, so you have free access to information.

But really, everyone has something to hide. If you didn't have something to hide, you wouldn't have curtains in your house or locks on your doors. If you don't have something to hide, tell me your bank account login and your social security number. If you don't have anything to hide, take the password off your wifi, your laptop, and your smartphone. Everyone has something they're trying to hide, and it's almost never as malicious as people who say "you're trying to hide something" think it is. More often, it's just embarrassing, not malicious.