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I have a couple from the hip actually, because America has grifting baked into it’s soul. In no particular order:
- MMS (Drinkin’ bleach)
- Crystal healing (most sellers)
- WitchTok kits (TikTok influencers selling expensive spices)
- Brain pills
- Any product peddled by a megachurch (see the Baker bucket for a great example)
- Chiropractors
As more of these come to me, I’ll try to expand the list.
Update: I can’t believe I forgot chiros! They turned themselves into a religion at one point to try to dodge medical licensure laws.
Baker Bucket is a good name for a gravity bong setup.
Idk about prevagen but my opthomologist definitely said any generic of preservation is very good, and artificial tears with flax seed oil will definitely relieve dry, itchy “sandy eye” feel. Idk if he really believes that or not but I thought I’d give some drops a try. Last time I tried artificial tears, it burned like soap so I hope it’s not a waste of money.
Oh I looked it up, there may (study funded by the industry) be a basis for that. Medical News Today
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Any product peddled by a megachurch (see the Baker bucket for a great example)
Some megachurches have sold freeze-dried prepper food. It’s not a grift per se, because it’s perfectly edible freeze dried food, but it’s overpriced for what you’re getting.
You’re right, but I was thinking of the buckets that are basically terrible quality slop that’s borderline inedible.
I might still call it a grift because they’re asking for payment as “donations” to skirt paying taxes on them. That, and like you said, it’s not a great value for what you get. Maybe not pure snake oil, but there’s definitely still enough dishonesty involved imo that I’d be comfortable calling it a grift.
I would say that a lot of stuff being peddled through tiktok and Instagram are scams. Those anti-5g dongles come to mind.
Tin foil hats are much better anti5g solution.
Plus, if you make the top of it concave, you can cook hotdogs up there in the summer!
Anti-5g dongles? That’s new for me, but I consume a lot of these grifts secondhand through a few podcasts I listen to. I might be behind.
Sounds like the bones of a good scam are there though, assuming the anti-5G conspiracy still gets traction and clicks.
Edit: Do you know if someone like bigclive got one? He takes those sorts of devices apart a lot to explain them and I’d love to see what’s inside. I just don’t want to pay the money for one to fund the grift.
There is a good few videos on them, it has died down significantly since the whole 5g panic went away. Some of them were just some clear USB keys, some were just stickers. Mr. Whosetheboss did a video on them.
Any “quick fix/all-in-one” fitness or nutrition solutions. While there are minute optimizations for elite athletes, 99.99% of the population can adhere to the general consensus of nutrition and health science.
- Do something that gets your heart rate up for at least 30 minutes a day. Speed walk, bike, row, shoot hoops, jump rope, doesn’t matter, just get your heart pumping hard for at least half an hour a day.
- Roughly a third of your food should be fresh leafy greens & veggies. A third should be whole grains and unprocessed starches and sugars like sweet potato and fresh fruit. The final third should be a protein. Lean meat like fish or chicken, or if you’re veg/vegan, beans, tofu, seeds, peas, etc.
- To build strength, general bodyweight exercises combined with stretching is fine for most people. If you wanna get really strong, get a few kettle bells or adjustable dumbells on the used market for $50-$100. You don’t need an expensive fitness club membership or one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.
- Don’t drink often, don’t smoke, don’t pound stimulants like caffeine or nicotine.
- Brush your teeth well.
- Get 6-8 hours a night of good quality sleep.
- Keep your brain engaged, read, play music, play games, learn a language, etc.
I’m speaking from experience, because I have fallen for stuff over the years that promised fast results and optimal methods with minimal effort. Fact is, unless you’re training for the Olympics or you have very specific heath conditions, those basic bullet points will cover the vast majority if general health and fitness.
You forgot the big ones.
- Do not watch porn.
- Do not fry your brain with multitasking.
- Do not fry your dopamine receptors with constant binging of social media, YouTube, TV shows, video games.
I am working on fixing myself for almost a year now.
I agree with almost everything you said, except I wouldn’t advocate for people including stretching as a regular part of exercise. Despite what people tend to think, there isn’t really evidence to support broad general benefits of stretching. Obviously, if you are a gymnast or another type of athlete with specific needs for range of motion beyond what is “normal”, go for it. It may not hurt, but it is likely a waste of time, and if you are constrained in the amount of time you can spend on exercise, you should spend that time doing things with well established benefits, like weightlifting.
The other thing I want to add on (again cause I agree with what you said) to the diet part is that people probably shouldn’t trust products like Athletic Greens to “count” as their daily vegetables, despite their marketing. I haven’t been able to find good research on it that wasn’t funded by them. Also, just more generally, I’m skeptical of the purported benefits of juice and smoothies. Again, it’s hard to find good studies on it, but much of the benefit of fruit and veggies is in the fiber and resulting delayed digestion, so it stands to reason that the processing removes some of the benefit.
one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.
Actually about $4000 to start, plus the cost of the weight plates, bars (I prefer Ivanko), Iron Grip dumbbell sets, and so on.
In almost all cases, it’s cheaper to have a gym membership at a decent hardcore gym.
There are a lot of things you simply can’t do with bodyweight alone. And you can’t do it with just a couple kettlebells and adjustable dumbbells either. Having a lot of strength and muscle mass when you’re young is a very strong predictor of health in old age, since past the age of about 40, people just start losing mass and strength; the more you have before that, the better off you are.
I said $2,000+ to encompass even more expensive machines/setups.
I never said bodyweight or a kettlebell set could provide exercises for every possible movement or strength vector.
I said that the vast majority of people don’t need anything more than those to build a healthy level of fitness. And given that the average cost of a gym membership in the US is around $50 per month, after a few months, their used kettle bells or simple dumbell set has already paid for itself.
And weights last basically forever unless they are severely damaged, so zero maintenance cost.
Nothing wrong with going more hardcore if that’s your thing, but that’s not at all necessary to build a solid base of strength and general fitness.
Body weight exercises can build plenty of muscle. You only need specialized muscle targeting once you’re body building. For health body weight exercises are ideal, targeting individual muscles is not as useful to fitness as training many muscles in tandem for common movements.
If you want to get really strong, you might want protein and creatine supplements to speed up your progress, but even that’s not necessary and they only speed things up a little.
IoT, AI, much of consensus based academia and press.
How is IoT snakeoil? A great chunk of the world’s infrastructure runs on IoT devices. Your electric, gas, and water meters are almost assuredly IoT if you are serviced within the US.
Thankfully. I do not need to tolerate the bullshit that Americans apparently have to.
As someone with deep experience in analysis of power sector, I can assure you that anything “smart” or “intelligent” will pointlessly increase cost to the final consumer, and margin for the owners of supply-delivery-chain. No exceptions.
Poor design and implementation. The S in IOT stands for security. So many devices connected to the internet that don’t need to be. I get that it’s cool to control devices from your phone, but why is it necessary to send data from the device to a company’s server so I can retrieve it with an app? I should be able to connect to the device directly from the app, across my local network, without having to send private data to the cloud.
I don’t disagree, but that’s not “snakeoil”.
Snake oil is a term used to describe deceptive marketing, health care fraud, or a scam. Similarly, snake oil salesman is a common label used to describe someone who sells, promotes, or is a general proponent of some valueless or fraudulent cure, remedy, or solution.
I feel like there is legitimate uses for IoT and Ai but it gets shoved into everything where it isn’t necessary.
Most antidepressant usage. Many of those people do not have a chemical problem in their brain, they are just unhappy due to all the societal problems. You can’t treat social problems with a chemical.
Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn’t the case.
For a detailed breakdown as to why, there’s a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.
So while “hi-res” audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren’t capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say “the placebo effect is a helluva drug.”
All you really need is the Nyquist frequency of human hearing to know. That’s a good breakdown for audiophiles I’m sure but it is broadly as simple as the Nyquist frequency.
Conversely low res audio clearly sounds like trash.
Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.
256/320 MP3s also do well. 128 MP3s not so much.
Yeah they do, although CBR performs noticeably worse than VBR with Lame MP3. As I mentioned elsewhere, MP3 @ V0 or V1 VBR sounds just as good as the above. I just personally haven’t used MP3 for years because the newer codecs are more efficient.
VBR is always preferable over CBR, no matter video or audio encoding. I use OPUS a lot. Also YouTube providing OPUS 160 VBR as audio stream option for all of its content is very handy.
Yeah, I’m thinking of circa 2000 MP3s. 128k was the good stuff and lower was still common.
Back when a 4 minute song was like 1.5MB so you could fit more music on your 256MB mp3 player because you could not afford an iPod.
Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it’s just not as efficient as the newer codecs.
Right you are, but don’t start telling everyone so I can’t silently download my lossless albums from Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz anymore.
It’s for all the pets at homes hearing the same audio, now with original insects and birds outside and mice in the walls.
True. There’s something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.
What genres are your bats listening to?
Goth.
A lot of it will depend on your output device; cheap headphones will wreck audio quality.
I remember the bad old days when .mp3 files for streaming were often 128kbps (or less!); I could absolutely hear audio artifacts on those, and it got significantly worse with lower bitrates. 320kbps though seems to be both fairly small, and I can’t personally tell the difference between that and any lossless formats.
I’ve always kinda wondered about this. I’m not an audio guy and really can’t tell the difference between most of the standards. That said, I definitely remember tons and tons ‘experts’ telling me that no one can tell the difference between 720p and 1080p TV at typical distance to your couch. And I absolutely could and many of the people I know could. I can also tell the difference between 1080 and 4k, at the same distances.
So I’m curious if there’s just a natural variance in an individual’s ability to hear and audiophiles just have a better than average range that does exceed CD quality?
Similar to this, I can tell the difference between 30fps and 60fps, but not 60 to 120, yet some people swear they can. Which I believe, I just know that I can’t. Seems like these guidelines are probably more averages, rather than hard biological limits.
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i think hi res is for professional work. If you’re going to process, modify, mix, distort the audio in a studio, you probably want the higher bit depth or rate to start with, in case you amplify or distort something and end up with an unintended artefact that is human audible. But the output sound can be down rated back to human levels before final broadcast.
O couse if a marketing person finds out there is a such a thing as “professional quality”. . . See also “military spec”, “aerospace grade”
Yeah to expand on this, in professional settings you’ll want a higher sampling frequency so you don’t end up with eg. aliasing, but for consumer use ≥44–48kHz sampling rate is pretty much pointless
I think this is the case where certain people simply can’t see it here the difference.
I collect video game and movie soundtracks and the main difference I can hear between a 320kbps VS a FLAC that’s in the 1000kbps range is not straight up “clarity” in the sense that something like an instrument is “clearer” but rather the spacing and the ability to discern the difference where instruments come from is much better in a Hi-Res file with some decent wired headphones (my pair is $200). All this likey doesn’t matter much though when most users stream via Spotify which sounds worse than my 320kbps locally and people are using Bluetooth headphones at lower bitrates since they don’t have better codec compatibility like aptX and LDAC.
It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.
Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.
The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.
which, incidentally, means they use up significantly more data/storage space and cost more money
All of this is very true, but this is the only issue I really disagree with here.
I am in an era where a good quality rip of a movie can be almost 50 gigabytes by itself. That means for every terabyte of storage, I can store just 20 of movies of this size.
Don’t even get my started on television series and how big those can balloon to with the same kind of encoding.
An entire collection of FLACs, thousands of albums worth, is still less than 500 gigabytes total, in other words half a terabyte. (My personal collection anyway)
I mean, the average size of one of my FLAC albums is around 200-300 megabytes. Even with the larger “hi-res” FLAC files you’re still not getting as obscenely big as movie and television files.
Sure, it takes up more space than an MP3 or a FLAC properly encoded to CD standards (my preferred choice, for the reasons outlined above), but realistically, the amount of space it takes up compared to those is negligible when compared to other types of media.
Storage and energy to operate storage has become incredibly cheap, especially when you’re dealing with smaller files like this.
This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.
I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping tenfold for no discernable benefit.
An extremely reasonable position to take! Because even if the increase in energy usage is negligible locally, when widespread, those small chunks of energy use add up into a much larger chunk of energy use. Especially when including transferring that over an endless number of networks.
I always talk about this in regards to automobiles and manual roll-up/down windows versus automatic windows. Sure, it’s an extremely small amount of energy to use for automatic windows on a car, but when you add up the energy used on every cars automatic windows through the life of each and every car with automatic windows and suddenly it’s no longer a small number. Very wasteful, imho.
You use something called VMAF to manage this 50GB problem.
If you can figure out, you just won the lottery. Wasting space is not necessary even for archival purpose.
50 GB for a BRD rip is one that is not re-encoded, that’s a straight rip from the disk.
50GB for the simple dual layer discs. You can theoretically reach 100GB with triple layer disks. The largest BDRip I have is 90GB for the Super Mario Bros. Movie.
Edit: UHD Blu-ray only supports dual and triple layer disks, not quad. Quad layer discs do exist though, with up to 128GB of capacity.
Vitamin and mineral supplements. You only need supplementation if you have a specific deficiency, and deficiencies are not extremely common. Most people who take supplements do not need them and are just peeing out all the extra things they’re putting in their bodies while shelling out ridiculous prices to “natural remedy” companies.
If you think you have a deficiency, explain why to a doctor. A blood test to know for sure is simple. A doctor will know what kind of supplementation would best serve you, and there may be an underlying reason that can be treated to fix it. Also eat some god damn vegetables you fat little piggy
Perhaps you can help me with a question? I don’t see any way to meet the daily recommend amount of vitamins. Iirc to get enough vitamin k I’d have to eat 200g of spinach every day or some such. Then we haven’t covered the other stuff yet.
So what am I not getting here?
Are you finding yourself deficient in vitamin K based on some symptom you’re experiencing? Vitamin K is in soybeans, cashews, broccoli, chicken, grapes, blueberries, and a bunch of oils, including soybean, olive, and canola oils, and the list goes on and on. Vitamin K deficiency in adults is extremely rare.
Like every other vitamin and mineral, eating average healthy (and even lots of unhealthy) foods will meet your RDA.
If you want a rabbit hole to go down, look into how RDIs/RDAs are arrived at…
200g of spinach sounds like a very reasonable amount for a single meal. I don’t see the problem here.
Every single day. And then there’s still other vitamins to cover.
Spinach has a lot more than just vitamin k, and so does everything else you eat. It would do you some good to actually record what you eat on an average day and take a look at their total nutritional content. A varied diet consisting of mostly whole foods will almost guarantee that you meet your daily needs. If your particular diet doesn’t, this exercise would reveal where the holes are. I’m willing to bet it’s a lot easier to patch up then you think.
Also, it seems that you only need 25g of spinach to reach your daily needs. That’s a ridiculously tiny amount of spinach. Considering that vitamin K is fat-soluble and can be stored, a single 200g meal of spinach will satisfy your vitamin k needs for over a week.
Sources: USDA says spinach has 483µg of vitamin K per 100g spinach. Health Canada recommends 120µg of vitamin K per day for an adult male. FDA also uses 120µg for the purposes of nutrition labels.
Agreed, but just FYI, if you want minerals and vitamins, eat innards, more specifically liver.
If I don’t take magnesium, I’ll get cramps. While a lot of supplements are superfluous, I think you’re overgeneralising.
2nd a doctor.
What about that protein powder? my brother is mad into it.
Gaining significant muscle mass and strength through heavy lifting requires adequate protein intake. It is extremely challenging to build the muscle needed to squat two or three times your body weight without dramatically increasing your protein consumption. Attempting to lift heavy weights without the proper nutritional support can lead to extended recovery times, increased injury risk, and wasted effort.
Whey protein powder can be a cost-effective and high-quality source of protein for those engaged in strength training. For individuals who lift weights regularly, protein powder can be an integral part of their training program and is not simply a gimmick. The notion that protein supplements are “snake oil” because the average person may not need them is flawed logic. The same could be said for weight training equipment, which would also be considered unnecessary for the general population, despite their benefits for those who strength train consistently.
The key is matching your nutritional intake, including protein consumption, to your training goals and needs. Dismissing helpful protein powder as snake oil simply because they may not benefit everyone is an oversimplification. The appropriate use of protein powder can be an important part of an effective strength training regimen for those who lift heavy weights.
I’d like to note in my top level comment I was referring to medically unnecessary vitamin and mineral supplementation. Protein powder is food and is not part of that. It’s 100% necessary for serious lifters, but it’s definitely also overused by people who are not serious lifters.
Isn’t there a limit of how much protein your body can absorb in a meal and the rest just gets metabolized/excreted.
Is your brother also mad into lifting weights? If not, they have no need for protein powder
yes.
Protein powder is a calorically dense food supplement, not a vitamin or mineral supplement
Unless you’re vegan, you’re probably already getting more protein than you need.
Protein is needed for building muscles but most meatheads in the USA just eat all the protein and don’t do enough of the exercise.
Only about 24% of people in the US aren’t “overweight” to “obese.”
Literally almost nobody needs this fucking protein because almost fuck-nobody is exercising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States
For the following statistics, “adult” is defined as age 20 and over. The overweight + obese percentages for the overall US population are higher reaching 39.4% in 1997, 44.5% in 2004, 56.6% in 2007, 63.8% (adults) and 17% (children) in 2008,in 2010 65.7% of American adults and 17% of American children are overweight or obese, and 63% of teenage girls become overweight by age 11. In 2013 the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that 57.6% of all American citizens were overweight or obese. The organization estimated that 3/4 of the American population would likely be overweight or obese by 2020. According to research done by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, it is estimated that around 40% of Americans are considered obese, and 18% are considered severely obese as of 2019. Severe obesity is defined as a BMI over 35 in the study. Their projections say that about half of the US population (48.9%) will be considered obese and nearly 1 in 4 (24.2%) will be considered severely obese by 2030.
What many US citizens need is portion control and regular exercise.
Seems like you just have an axe to grind about fat people. Protein is not the deciding factor in weight gain, calories are, so I don’t know why you think a link to the wiki page about obesity would be convincing that protein powder is snake oil.
Even when you coincide that it is relevant you dismiss with little justification. Also BMI is not a great metric for individuals, many that have a lot of muscle are measured as overweight because there is a lot more to bodies that height and mass.
Can you justify why protein powder is snake oil in line with the other things in the thread? I will grant that most people have more than enough protein in a regular diet, but stats about obesity says literally nothing about if powder can help your workouts give the results you’re hoping for.
While the obesity part is kind of a digression, I think they were pretty clear: protein powder is a waste if you have a typical American diet and are not exercising, which is apparently most Americans. While protein powder on its own isn’t snake oil, it effectively is for most people.
My point was that people who are likely obese are busy trying to suck down protein shakes when they probably already have enough protein. Like I said, if you’re in the USA and not explicitly vegan, you probably already get enough protein from your daily diet to build muscle.
When less than 25% of the country is a healthy weight, people don’t need to build muscle, they need to lose weight.
I am fucking fat myself, maybe that’s why I feel so strongly about this. America has a massive obesity problem and it’s tied to our eating habits (especially overly processed foods… like protein shakes) and we’re not going to find out way out of it by buying protein shakes.
The protein supplement industry alone is currently a $6.57 billion industry. Are you really going to tell me the only people buying them are that sliver of people with healthy weights?
If you’re overweight and want to lose weight, you don’t need a protein supplement. Yes, it’s more complicated than calories in/calories out but the reality is and has been 1. portion sizes in USA are out of control, 2. the vast majority of the country have weight issues not muscle issues, and 3. Excess protein doesn’t help you lose weight.
The less than 25% of the country that has a normal weight is not the source of the $6.57 billion dollar market cap of the protein supplement industry.
But sure, it’s not that fatasses are focusing on the wrong fucking things, like protein. The vast majority of Americans like to think they would pump iron but most fucking don’t and the evidence is that over 75% of us are overweight, obese, and morbidly obese.
Gyms would cease to function if all the people who paid for them actually tried to use them.
Finally, the men who suck these down are trying to look like men who suck down tons of steroids. Those results are not achievable with protein and exercise alone, thus making protein a snake oil to cover for steroid abuse. Steroid abuse is real and hiding behind this “you just need more protein” bullshit is a farce. The number of men who claimed to be gaining insane muscles while only “exercising and eating healthy” to only have it come out that they abuse the fuck out of steroids is too damn high.
See: Elon Musk’s distended gut and man-boobs from sucking down steroids but not actually putting in the work of lifting. Joe Rogan’s distended stomach is looking pretty rough these days, too.
You seem quite invested so I have a question. I have learned that protein fills more and therefore reduces appetite. Won’t a protein shake be a relatively healthy option which reduces snacking and overeating of less healthy meals? This has also anecdotally been my experience but I haven’t done it very much.
I’ve had the opposite experience myself. Protein shakes keep me full for about as long as water. Protein rich whole foods are much more satiating for the same quantity of protein.
While I’m going to ignore your clear issues regarding other people’s weight, there’s 258 million people, if a quarter of them spend $100 a year on “protein shakes” there’s your 6.5 billion, and now that number seems low.
- Except vitamin D, deficiency is very widespread
- And iron for most women
- And sometimes magnesium for sports (which we should all do)
Car engine injector cleaner and almost any add-it-yourself fuel additive.
CBD oil. It doesn’t matter which exotic ailment you’re talking about, someone will ask you if you’ve tried it and that they think it might help.
CBD oil. I bought some about 5 years ago and it did nothing but grease up my tongue
Essential oil.
Dietary advice based on the food pyramid/MyPlate. Before the late '70s, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and mental illnesses were all rare in the general population.
We need to be eating fewer carbohydrates, not basing our diets around them. We need to be getting most of our calories from fat, not demonising it.
Thankfully, we have people like Dr. Ken Berry, Dr. Chris Palmer, Dr. Anthony Chaffee, Dr. Georgia Ede, Dr. Shawn Baker, Dr. Paul Mason, Dr. Tony Hampton, Dr. Jason Fung, and others spreading this message.
“Social” “networking”
VPNs like NordVPN for almost everyone.
Considering Nord (and most VPNs, especially the ones that advertise themselves) are all owned by one company, who has a huge conflict of interest (they’re an ad company) with VPNs to begin with.
But if you don’t use a VPN with military grade encryption hackers can steal your money from the banking website that only uses military grade encryption!
So your saying I should keep an eye on the War Thunder forums?
“Almost everyone” seems a bit broad. Lots of people watch porn and illegally download stuff that they don’t want their ISP to know about, especially in countries like the USA where ISPs are allowed to sell browsing statistics of their customers for marketing purposes.
I take offence to the “protect against hackers” bullshit those ads keep repeating, but for their intended purpose, VPNs are a good solution.
A VPN sure. I’m not sure about Nord.
Your ISP selling your browsing data is the hacker.
Who do you trust more? Your isp, or a random vpn Company that not only own one vpn-service, but surprisingly many. (Nord security owns NordVPN and Surfshark, Kape owns ExpressVPN and Cyberghost). And wouldn’t it be need if you, as NSA, would have a direct connection to the data people concerned with there privacy? It’s not like their “no log” policy really exists if the have to write logs by law.
That’s the point of VPNs, isn’t it? Do you trust the companies that sell your location information to shady people like bounty hunters or some foreign VPN company?
Personally, I trust Mullvad more than I trust many ISPs. It all depends on how good your ISP is and your country’s laws are. ISPs here in the Netherlands used to collect the IP addresses and other metadata of all websites you visit, as well as location information, for six months or more, because the law forced them to, in case the police ever needed that information. The law got overturned (though that doesn’t mean ISPs can’t track you anymore, they’re just not forced to) but this definitely feels like a reason for an always-on VPN to me. The government also pushed for IPv6 not because it’s not 1980 anymore, but because they foolishly thought that it would give every device a unique IP address so they could track people better.
Not that I want to evade the police, but when crazy religious people get in power, I don’t want to get convicted for contacting porn sites at some point. VPN providers that you don’t trust not to log anything are still better for privacy than that.
Some VPN providers lie and say they will never log anything (only for lawsuits to prove otherwise). You can’t trust those. I consider every VPN that pays for YouTube ads to be untrustworthy. Mullvad, and some of its competitors, however, seem to be relatively trustworthy.
With VPNs, you move your point of tracking to another company or country. Whether that benefits you depends on who you are, where you live, and what your priorities are.
Just about all the products sold on amazon.
Finance courses promoted by various youtubers.
