“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”

It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.

Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.

I’m always using a proton vpn. As well as a hardened librewolf and default ironfox. I definitly get more captchas and there are some sites that don’t load up, but I have yet found a site that blocks me that I’d turn the vpn off for.

Somethings to note though:

I have been suspended from esty after buying stuff, likely from the vpn. I appealed but nothing has really happened.

Youtube can be a pain, I no longer use google accounts and I don’t bother using their captchs. I just shuffle around on my vpn until I’m no longer a bot.

Streaming; netflix is fine, though I stick to my home country normally.

I tried a couple of other with limited success, nowadays I only use netflix on my compy with a vanilla firefox

I think I tried Paramount and it wasn’t working out. But it may have been because of it not available in my contry or something.

Disney was givin me a lot of trouble, but I think I did get it to work on my phone with the vpn once. (Had to restart the phone with Disney+ disabled first, the it worked.)

Honesty it’s not that bad.
Also as I was writing this I was going list out my privacy set up, but I realized I think I’ve become meme.

Some non-polotical reasons:

If you live in the US there’s a better chance than not that your ISP is selling your personal data. Outside US idk, maybe still though. Either way you’re putting a lot of trust in a telecom company.

Since net neutrality was removed your traffic can be throttled based on what type of traffic it is, so having it all encrypted for the first hop at least has it treated all the same.

Two political ones I haven’t seen mentioned yet:

You don’t actually know you don’t have anything to hide. Again, assuming US, the amount of federal laws there are couldn’t fit in a pickup truck if they were all printed out. And if someone’s looking to make an example of you then you shouldn’t make it easy for them to find a reason. My favorite example is that throwing out mail that isn’t addressed to you (like junk mail for a previous tenant etc) is a felony.

You also could be falsely accused of a crime. For example, your phone gave out it’s location info near a place where coincidentally an actual crime had taken place. Best to not give that information freely to everyone and have to pony up $10k for a lawyer for nothing.

Encrypt your DNS as well, then ISP can’t even see what you’re searching for

https://youtu.be/xAo61IaXun8

When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide

But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi

Asvertising and surveillance pricing. Even if you aren’t doing anything illegal, data about your internet habits is being collected, stored, and sold in order to serve you ads and potentially affect the prices of things you spend on.

We use VPNs at work a lot for protecting traffic as it passes over the public internet between distant sites. From a security perspective, it’s better not to give devices direct access to the internet if they don’t actually need it. That’s stuff we’re running ourselves though; not a commercial VPN service we’re paying for.

Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :

There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.

…

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.

What you consider legal now, could be considered grounds for arrest or worse if the world changes. And the world is always changing.

That said, if you have no interest in torrenting files or starting insurrections out of your basement, a VPN isn’t going to do much for you. They’re barely effective for actually protecting you if the actual government wanted to go after you for something and your data and personal info is already compromised by the fact that you’re here, chatting on the internet. If you just browse social media it will give you a bigger headache to have it on since most sites now block VPN traffic and reddit will even permanently shadowban you if you log in under a VPN.

While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.

That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.

The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that now illegal thing in the past.

Yes. Absolutely. Privacy is for everyone.

You are assuming that the things legal and illegal today will continue to align with your morality. “I don’t do anything bad” only holds value while you and your governing body share beliefs.

What if tomorrow you disagree? Suddenly there would be a long history of potentially incriminating internet history associated with you. What if it’s for something you can’t even control, such as “using the internet while female” in a society that recently banned women from using the internet?

This level of paranoia shouldn’t be required yet look at the state of the world.

A VPN doesn’t just allow you to change your location. It’s a tunnel between you and someone you trust (a VPN provider). All your traffic shows up as originating from the trusted partners address do that it cannot be traced back to you. They offer this to lots of customers and if your VPN provider is worth their salt, anonymizes these interactions so that they can’t even tell people who did what.

Doing nothing illegal, today…

There’s value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.

Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.

Most VPNs won’t even work for daily browsing as far as I’m aware. You’ll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.

Personally, for generic browsing, I’m not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I’m accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they’ll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.

There’s also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.

Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.

And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don’t think it’s necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).