[relax88]

Is anyone actually pretending it’s different?

Most people I talk to buy VPN services to avoid legal threats from pirated movies or to avoid traffic surveillance from their local ISP / workplace / institution.

I’ve never heard someone describe it like a hard-to-denonymize tor node or anything.

[eloff]

Lots of services are advertised that way. It's probably half the ads I encounter on YouTube.

[relax88]

Hmm, I block all ads at the network level so maybe I’m just out of the loop on this topic.

[yosito]

Also to prevent people on your local network from snooping on your traffic and stealing credentials and other sensitive data that might be passed over the wire. I once had my AWS API keys compromised this way. It was a pain to resolve that situation. I'm a lot more careful now.

[switch007]

> I once had my AWS API keys compromised this way.

Presumably you were copying them over the network unencrypted?