[romanichm12]

It's fascinating how VPN services have successfully marketed themselves as the ultimate privacy solution, when in reality, they are often just a middleman with full visibility into your internet traffic. How can we, as users, ever truly verify a VPN provider's claims of "no logging" or "complete privacy"? It's a promise based on trust, but why should we trust a company whose business model revolves around our data?

[EspressoGPT]

It's especially fascinating how such a highly technical, rather nerd-ish concept is being marketed so widely. They did a great job there.

[MattGaiser]

It has lots of practical uses such as evading Netflix geo-restrictions or getting around local network restrictions, even without considering privacy.

[mnd999]

> Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy.

[coldtea]

What else would a proper VPN be besides a particular way to have a internet-wide proxy (as opposed to e.g. just a web proxy)?

[mnd999]

Traditionally it’s a mechanism to connect to a private network via a public one, for example to access a corporate network from home.

But a proxy doesn’t have to be a web proxy. Socks proxies were pretty common at one time.

[input_sh]

> How can we, as users, ever truly verify a VPN provider's claims of "no logging" or "complete privacy"?

Court orders. They might be lying to customers, but they're unlikely to lie to a court. So if a court approaches them and they respond with "we have no data", they have no data.

Okay it's never gonna be no data, they'll still supply email address, payment method, registration date and similar things, but that's not my concern.

[WithinReason]

In addition, many VPN services have been tested in court like this and have been found to do no logging, showing they can be trusted.