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by RKearney 3373 days ago
Honestly, I never understood the interest people had in companies providing VPN for personal use. The way I always saw it is if I was traveling and needed VPN while on public/unencrypted Wi-Fi, I would just VPN back to my home. Of course this means I trust my ISP not to do anything nefarious.

This topic has the opportunity to become a huge discussion, so for the sake of brevity I'll summarize with my personal, opinionated solutions for various use cases.

  1. You don't trust your ISP
  1.1 Switch ISPs (not always practical)
  1.2 Setup a VPN on a $2.50/mo or $5/mo VPS (this could incur bandwidth costs
      if you're pushing multiple TB per month across the VPS. Note you're still
      at the mercy of the VPS and their colo, but no different than today with
      a VPN provider.)
  2. You don't trust the public network you're on
  2.1 VPN back to your home. This would be free.
  2.2 See 1.2
  3. You don't trust the site operator of the site you're visiting
  3.1 Use Tails linux and Tor
I can't think of any other use cases.
1 comments

> 1.1 Switch ISPs (not always practical)

That's the use case. For many Americans there is literally no viable option here.

Take Albuquerque for example: if you want a solid 20mbit connection or better, your only option is Xfinity (Comcast).

Don't even get me started on mobile data.