Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

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Gavrushka
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Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

Post by Gavrushka » Tue, 21. Dec 21, 16:15

After years of using free antivirus software, my provider decided to drop the support of the free product so I upgraded to the full product with them, and this including a small daily allowance of data to use with VPN. It'll automatically engage when I'm paying for something online, but I'd have to pay a relatively modest lump of cash to have it 'always on.'

But is there a need? I like the idea of being able to see content denied me because of my geographical location, and do get frustrated when some US websites deny me access due to EU privacy laws, and I understand that would be overcome due to one aspect of VPN. In itself, that isn't enough to justify having it, in my opinion, but are there other benefits / risks mitigated by having it permanently on?

And I've just realised, for almost 20 years, this forum has been the one I've come to for advice on many subjects... Damn...
“Man, my poor head is battered,” Ed said.

“That explains its unusual shape,” Styanar said, grinning openly now. “Although it does little to illuminate just why your jowls are so flaccid or why you have quite so many chins.”

“I…” Had she just called him fat? “I am just a different species, that’s all.”

“Well nature sure does have a sense of humour then,” Styanar said. “Shall we go inside? It’d not be a good idea for me to be spotted by others.”

Alan Phipps
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Re: Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

Post by Alan Phipps » Tue, 21. Dec 21, 16:27

I think that type of question is much like 'Does my house need a sophisticated burglar alarm?' and the answer depends a lot on whether you expose stuff worth taking, what your other general security measures are like, what level of actual threat exists, and how much you want any added peace of mind you might get.

The clue might be that many online security providers include limited VPN provision but may charge you more for the full service, as you have found out. So is that additional level of security and expense more applicable to your benefit or to theirs? That is pretty much for you to consider and decide.

I guess all that is a typical and unhelpful non-answer. :D
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pjknibbs
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Re: Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

Post by pjknibbs » Tue, 21. Dec 21, 16:50

I've never used one nor felt the need to use one. To my mind, even if you're worried about external people having access to your browsing data, all that a VPN does is move that concern from your own ISP to the VPN company--and those are not perfect; I recall NordVPN got hacked a while ago.

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red assassin
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Re: Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

Post by red assassin » Tue, 21. Dec 21, 17:02

If you want to access stuff that has geographical blocks on it, sure, give a VPN a shot for that. (Note that many places applying geographical blocks will also apply blocks for known VPN endpoints, though!)

Otherwise, the answer is almost certainly no. It's not the noughties any more; nearly all traffic, and certainly anything sensitive, is under TLS at this point, which enormously reduces the amount of trust you need to have in the whole intermediate network. Furthermore, using a VPN transfers any remaining trust you need to have in your immediate network environment (mostly "will they sell my browsing metadata to advertisers" and what happens to the remaining vestiges of unencrypted traffic) from your regulated local ISP to your VPN provider, which is not necessarily actually an improvement. In return you pay subscription fees and a likely quite severe speed/latency penalty. (As more and more of the internet gets served from incredibly fast CDN servers deployed incredibly close to end user networks, the relative expense of routing all your traffic through a VPN server grows - the edge of my local network is about 12ms from Cloudflare's edge, which is absurdly fast - it takes about 3.5ms to get from my device to my edge router!)

VPN providers advertise incredibly aggressively on the basis of a lot of claims which are anywhere between misleading and actively untrue.

In your particular case, I am also a bit concerned by the suggestion that it will "automatically engage when you're paying for something online" - as mentioned there's no reason to do this, as any online payments will be under TLS anyway and a VPN won't help with the remaining threats, and it must be doing some fairly aggressive monitoring of your browsing to work out when it thinks you're paying for something online, which isn't necessarily a good thing either.
A still more glorious dawn awaits, not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise, a morning filled with 400 billion suns - the rising of the Milky Way

Gavrushka
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Re: Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

Post by Gavrushka » Tue, 21. Dec 21, 17:19

Well that's a pretty definitive 'no' from everyone, so I'll invest the money more wisely in a house special kebab.

I think I can disable the 'auto engage' feature of (Bitdefender) VPN for payments, if there's a concern it's at best unnecessary or perhaps outright intrusive.

Yeah, there's no doubt that the company are giving it the hard sell, and it was unnerving how they seemed to suggest it was a free for all for miscreants if not used.

I'll toast you all as I gorge myself on kebab.
“Man, my poor head is battered,” Ed said.

“That explains its unusual shape,” Styanar said, grinning openly now. “Although it does little to illuminate just why your jowls are so flaccid or why you have quite so many chins.”

“I…” Had she just called him fat? “I am just a different species, that’s all.”

“Well nature sure does have a sense of humour then,” Styanar said. “Shall we go inside? It’d not be a good idea for me to be spotted by others.”

jlehtone
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Re: Does the 'Average' home user need VPN?

Post by jlehtone » Tue, 21. Dec 21, 19:37

Kebab is definitely better than such VPN.

In the ancient past ...
At home you have private network. All machines and connections between them are in your control. Mostly trustworthy. One of them, the router, is a gateway to other networks.

Now (after couple of bites of kebab), your home is a mansion and there is a lake in your estate. By the lake you have a sauna and you expand your network to it. Still one private network on your land, in your cable.

But, you got some change back with the kebab, which you invest and buy a summer cottage from Spain. You set up a network in that cottage as well, but it is separate from your home network. Both can connect to the "Internet". If only you could use the Internet like you use the cable between your mansion and sauna ...

That is what VPN, virtual private network, was made for. Traffic between the two sites travels "open net", but encrypted, so that ears on the net can't tell that the fridges in mansion and cottage coordinate kebab-status. There is a "tunnel" between the sites. Other traffic, e.g. to Egosoft Fora, does not use that tunnel.

Then came the "roadwarrior". You want to hide that you occasionally are at the cottage. You keep up appearances that you are always at home. Always surf Egosoft Fora from home, never from other locations. Solution was simple: you told the cottage router to push everything through the tunnel, via home. That is routing.

Enter modern, marketed "VPN". You have lost home and estate. Only thing left is the home router, but even it is owned by some company. You sit in your cottage. You still try to obfuscate that you are "at home", so you continue to tunnel via that "company VPN" (even though you don't quite know where that "home" is). This form of "VPN" ... does it differ from "dark net", "Tor", etc?


Websites used to use HTTP. They are shifting to HTTPS that uses TLS. Particularly the "online payment" should all avoid plain HTTP. The original VPN was more for using the services within own, private network that either did not have or could not use encrypting protocol.

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