Hardware & Technical Using a free VPN? Why not skip the middleman and just send your data to President Xi?

[Dural]

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/11/19/vpn_app_investigation/ Yikes...

Along similar lines - you may have seen those security camera and baby monitors with apps where you can view the pictures on your mobile over the internet? Guess where a lot of the servers are? China. Anyone using one of these things as intended is literally streaming live video and audio to China. If you think that's perfectly fine, good luck to you and also we should speak about the bridge and the magic beans I have for sale.

 

[Para Handy]

I pay a premium to use NordVPN - to be honest I don't use it as much as I could / previously did - but it is handy for watching TV from other countries.

 

[Dural]

I use a paid VPN as well, my service provider blocks certain traffic types and patterns from my home I need to use for business purposes and the VPN gets round that issue. Being able to get round geoblocking is handy too

Anyone needing a VPN really needs to research based on their use case using sites like this for instance https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparison-chart/ and also shouldn't rely on a single information source or review site.

 

[The Lawful]

On the internet, you're either the customer or the product, and sometimes both. Technically, paying a fee won't help you much. Either you can trust your provider (including the ISP) or not, and since the LulzSec incident, it became plain obvious the answer may be simply no. Not to speak of PRISM or Boundless Informant. VPN is just another MiM.

O7,
[noob]

 

[Dural]

On the internet, you're either the customer or the product, and sometimes both. Technically, paying a fee won't help you much. Either you can trust your provider (including the ISP) or not, and since the LulzSec incident, it became plain obvious the answer may be simply no. Not to speak of PRISM or Boundless Informant. VPN is just another MiM.

O7,
[noob]

You can certainly make things worse for yourself by choosing a shady VPN service provider.

You can't trust anyone, the important question is how valuable your information is I think. At this point the lengths someone would need to go to to be anonymous on the internet are ridiculous and you're only a single mistake away from linking yourself to all that delicious meta data they have been collecting.

Also, hello, we did a CG in wing

 

[FrogsFriend]

I suppose you still have some choice over which shady government(s) is(are) spying on your data.

 

[Robert Maynard]

Political thread loosely dressed up as technical - closed accordingly.