I'm just looking for recommendations, it will mostly be for home use covering desktop/laptops/phones.

Any to avoid? Other than free ones.

Depends on what your objective is.

Protection of data, not as concerned with changing regions for access to movies, etc.

I'm happy with PIA VPN. It's worked well for me and is priced well. I think it was something like $75 for 3 years and on 10 devices.

I also use SonicWall -SentinelOne/Capture Client EDR for endpoint security on all of my computers. It's not cheap, but it's one of the best out there.

If you don't have a firewall in your house you should definitely get a good EDR solution. The top ones are SentinelOne, CrowdStrike and SonicWall's Capture Client (SentinelOne based).

Protection from who? You're just moving the endpoint to another place on the public internet, and have then chosen to route all of your traffic through another third party who has full access to it. You've also basically advertised, "look at me, my data might be interesting!"

VPN's at their core are about the introduction of some degree of anonymity when you surf the web. How can anonymity be important? In short, every activity each use does is tracked and brokered to 3rd party's for innumerable purposes from targeted advertisements, tracking the specifics of your online activity, to location tracking.

The problem has reached a point where companies like Inconi and LifeLock have become necessary for identity protection. Put another way, being without a VPN can be seen as similar to going grocery shopping with an exact copy of your drivers license on your tee shirt for all to see. Nothing good can come of wearing that t-shirt or surfing w/o a VPN.

AgCMT said:

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In short, every activity each use does is tracked and brokered to 3rd party's for innumerable purposes from targeted advertisements, tracking the specifics of your online activity, to location tracking.

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If you're using most apps on your phone or websites on your computer, they can still track you. A VPN changes where your traffic exits onto the open web (where it is typically still encrypted). The only thing it can possibly change is localization information based on IP address (the GPS in your phone may still be available.) They can still track what you're clicking on, what pages you're going to, all your searches, etc.

In reality, HTTPS is pretty adept at preventing man in the middle attacks where a 3rd party intercepts your data. The privacy problem we have doesn't come from nefarious actors stealing our precious bodily fluids personal data from the series of tubes that make up the internet. The problem is that part of the revenue stream for many websites and web based services is collecting and selling information about us that we quasi-willfully provide them... and a VPN doesn't do anything to change that. They don't personalize based on IP address and that's the only thing that a VPN is going to conceal. The information will still be collected. It will still be sent through your internet connection, into the VPN and on into the databases of advertising companies like Alphabet.

If you don't want to be tracked, a reasonable start is to install an ad-blocker. The good ones can prevent some of the tracking methods that advertisers use. Then go into services provided by people like Google and opt out of personalized ads. Supposedly Apple phones are better about tracking data but I haven't looked into that enough personally to say with any confidence. Start looking into using services that you pay for rather than free services that are supported by selling information about you to advertisers...

If you're concerned about identity theft on the internet, the best thing you can do is use strong passwords and don't use the same password across more than one important site and set some transaction notifications on your credit cards. A password manager is helpful for this (LastPass is to be avoided). Enable 2 factor authentication on as many important websites as possible and get a yubikey or one of their competitors. I would say to be mindful of what websites you use credit/debit cards on, but so many of them have terrible security that its a crapshoot if you use many websites.

Do what you can to make yourself a harder target than the average person for identity theft. Realize that until privacy laws are passed in this country, its going to be a losing battle. VPN's are great for getting around IP address based rate limits or localization restrictions. They're not going to make an appreciable difference in your "privacy". The leaky part isn't your connection to the websites, its the websites themselves.

akaggie05 said:

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Protection from who? You're just moving the endpoint to another place on the public internet, and have then chosen to route all of your traffic through another third party who has full access to it. You've also basically advertised, "look at me, my data might be interesting!"

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Eh,... they don't really have access to it. Most websites are HTTPS at this point, so the traffic is going to be pretty effectively encrypted. This applies whether you are using a VPN or not.

The problem is the websites and apps that collect data about you and send it to advertising companies and they can do what they do through a VPN.

I get that the broad usage of HTTPS prevents snooping on the internals of traffic. The VPN provider will still be able to see where your traffic is going, patterns of usage, etc. Are you watching videos on YouTube or connected to a portal at your company (and from there who do you work for, etc.).

It all boils down to who you trust more. Personally, I'll take my chance with large Tier 1/2 ISPs where all of your traffic is aggregated for the first few hops and then scattered out for the rest of the journey at major peering points onto other backbone networks not even run by your ISP. Contrast that with a VPN where you shift visibility into your traffic patterns to a third party company who likely has less stringent security controls, more opportunities for social engineering, insider threats, etc.

It's been interesting to watch the explosion of paid VPN services. My theory is that it's a gold mine in terms of ROI for these companies. Bandwidth is cheap these days. Shifting packets around costs very little relative to the monthly fees charged. And it's all marketed under the guise of "more security!!" Of course who wouldn't want that? I'm just not convinced it really adds security and in some cases I can see how it makes you less secure.

I don't really trust internet backbone providers any more than anyone else. They mainly just seem to be less interested in aggregating data. They seem pretty comfortable sticking to their traditional business model. If I ever had delusions that I was the target of a state or federal investigation, I would expect them to allow whatever wire tap the feds could get a warrant for, which sucks, but is a very low probability event.

Very nearly 100% of the leaks are going to come from a company's website getting hacked. I have like 14 entries on haveibeenpwned. My personal data is all out there from the time that the federal government got hacked.

The proliferation of VPN's is really strange to me too. It may be a gym membership kind of thing. People pay so little for them that they're unlikely to notice them renewing and may never actually use them or use them extremely rarely.

I've heard great things about Mullvad.

VPNs are great for more than just an additional layer of Swiss cheese in your security model. I use a VPN back to my home network when working in a coffee shop or traveling. Much of my company's infrastructure enforces IP restrictions and being able to use the same public IP address no matter where I am is a major time saver.

Also, few libraries, coffee shops or hotels provide a secure, private connection to their network.

Definitely agree about running your own VPN to get back to your home network when on the road using public wifi. That's the slam dunk use case.

akaggie05 said:

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It's been interesting to watch the explosion of paid VPN services. My theory is that it's a gold mine in terms of ROI for these companies. Bandwidth is cheap these days. Shifting packets around costs very little relative to the monthly fees charged. And it's all marketed under the guise of "more security!!" Of course who wouldn't want that? I'm just not convinced it really adds security and in some cases I can see how it makes you less secure.

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Many of the free VPN services operate on a model of data aggregation and data sales. They collect and sell your browsing data. Offering a paid VPN service helps market the security aspect as they often claim that because they make money via subscriptions they have no need to sell your data. The security aspect really depends on the provider. Would recommend doing a lot of research on features and track record. There are several reputable VPNs who follow through on this and don't aggregate or even log your use of the service on their servers. Many of them now have built-in malware and tracking blockers.

But even in the case of those companies you are still funneling your data all to one place and are trusting their services and software.

Linus Tech Tips was thinking briefly about launching a VPN. They had a discussion about it on their WAN Show a few months ago. They said the code was incredibly easy and once it gets going with a sufficient subscriber base it basically prints money. They opted not to do so because they didn't want people attempting to do illegal things through their service and didn't want the legal headaches.

Also, a decent way to help prevent so much data aggregation of your browsing habits is to use an Ad blocker or use a browser like Brave which has it built in. Pages will load in a snap compared to base Chrome or whatever.

For example (mods don't hate me) I pay $15 a month to TexAgs yet when I log on there are 99+ ads, trackers, etc. potentially sending data about my browsing to third parties. I know there are 99+ because that's how many Brave blocks when I load some pages here.

Anyone used surfshark vpn? Is it good?

The use-case for VPN's is providing at least some modicum of additional protection on unsecured networks (e.g. open wireless/guest networks, etc.). Not for obscuring network traffic from inspection from providers.

i tried a couple free ones about 10 years ago to try and hide my IP when i got banned from a forum (not this one). It didnt work. the moderator even taunted me. im still kinda pissed at that geek.

Since I work from home now, I use a VPN all the time and on all my devices. I tried several VPN services, both free and paid. Well, I think that the paid ones provide more protection. I've been using IPVanish for several months, no issues or regrets. You can check a review here https://www.firesticktricks.com/ipvanish-review.html if interested. Moreover, I was lucky to buy it at a big discount.

I use the VPN that comes with Google One. I primarily use Google One for the extra storage, but may want to consider Google One if you are already paying for extra storage.