Do you need a VPN?

Re:Do you need a VPN? by derefr on Monday October 30, 2017 @02:16PM (#15587488)

It's a bit like how "stranger danger" isn't a thing kids get taught about anymore, because random strangers aren't risky if you go up to them, only if they come up to you. (Or, in more statistical terms: bad actors are a small proportion of the pool, but they have an incentive to self-select into interacting with you that good actors do not. If you just draw randomly from the pool, you won't get a bad actor. If you let the pool show the initiative, you'll get mostly bad actors.)

Your VPN provider is just some random company. You went up to them. They're randomly selected (insofar as your choices are random) from the space of all VPN providers, and most providers aren't malicious.

Your ISP is, at least in the US, almost always a monopoly. They're self-selected: they went up to you.

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Re:Do you need a VPN? by bearbearbear on Tuesday October 31, 2017 @12:40AM (#15591115)

A VPN provider can tell you they're not logging your traffic because they think they aren't but really they are because there's a box somewhere that your traffic passes through that has logging enabled (for example -- and don't hyperfocus on the example, I know how you programmer types like to pick up the example and play ping pong with it for six hours).

So incompetence is a reason to not trust a provider as well.

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