[toadi]

As far as I see there are 2 uses for VPN.

1/ Being "safer" using public wifis. I use 5g hotspot to my phone to avoid that. 2/ Proxy to other countries for streaming reasons. Still use it for this.

All the rest is just bogus marketing speak.

[dharmab]

3. Avoiding government blocks/censorship/monitoring (if you trust your government less than the VPN provider). Not every country has open and free access.

4. Accessing your home country's internet while abroad, since many sites redirect you to a foreign market version

5. Checking if another geo has cheaper prices. Tom Scott mentioned he got cheaper prices on international rental cars by VPNing to the destination country than when going direct from a foreign country.

[Contusion3532]

6. At least in the USA, ISPs can sell your browsing habits(DNS lookups, connection end-points) to third parties. A VPN that doesn't sell this data protects you from that level of snooping from the ISP.

[amanaplanacanal]

7. Hiding torrent usage from my ISP so they don’t cut my service.

[xethos]

Y'all forgot adblock via at-home (or at least self-hosted) PiHole, for when you want to block ads on LTE.

[georgyo]

There is one more and that is unreliable or filtered connections.

Having wireguard style VPN on a network that is unreliable can keep connections alive that might otherwise be killed.

This usually isn't due to any error correction, just bypassing the stateful nat deciding your connection is not valid anymore.

[Contusion3532]

Interesting! I'd never thought about that before.

[Helmut10001]

Last: Self-hosting stuff and accessing it from remote. Reduces the burden to harden locally hosted and publicly accessible services. This is what I use VPNs the most.

[raesene9]

Assuming all the sites you care about (From a security perspective) run over TLS, the wi-fi risk is less now than it used to be (when HTTPS uptake was lower).

[enlyth]

In the UK at least, most major ISP block torrent sites, and if a copyright holder complains to the ISP that your IP was downloading a movie they have the rights to, you may get a warning letter from your ISP through the post, including the filename you were downloading. This has happened to me in the past.

VPNs solve both of these problems for me, however shady they may be under the hood

[eugene3306]

Another example. Happened to me today. I was unable to pay online for a bus ticket until I set up VPN out of Cambodia to SG. I tried two cards by two different banks on three different ticketing sites. Without VPN all my payment attempts were rejected.

[deadbeeves]

Also the original use of VPN: to be able to access the internal resources of a network while physically outside the network.

[osigurdson]

The internet seems slightly broken if necessary to trust the first hop.