Pretty funny to say they're snake oil, and then list 3 very good reasons to have one.

I think the snake oil claim is in regard to VPN companies marketing themselves as a security product. The security benefits that these companies claim in their ads are dubious but of course there’s other benefits to them, they just can’t advertise that they can be used for these things.

The problem is people who aren’t aware of this see these ads and think that they actually do prevent hackers from stealing their information.

> I think the snake oil claim is in regard to VPN companies marketing themselves as a security product

Considering that confidentiality is a vital component of overall security, it's not necessarily unreasonable to describe a VPN as a security product. Of course, it's not the panacea some companies claim; nobody's "surfing the web in full security and privacy" with just a VPN service.

We already have really good client-server confidentiality (and integrity) assurances from the wide adoption of TLS/HTTPS. Wrapping that in a VPN doesn't buy you all that much additional security. Maybe a little bit of DNS privacy and being able to mask your IP address on torrents, but that's all that comes to mind.

Similar to cryptocurrency in this respect. People would often tout nebulous benefits for hypothetical legitimate use cases, when in reality they were only ever really good at ponzi schemes and conducting illicit transactions.

That argument only makes sense if people don't really understand what a VPN is or what it is actually for. They're somewhat of an expensive and complex thing that usually noticeably slows down your internet connection... I doubt many people are buying them because they think it protects them from identity theft or something. I haven't seen an ad on the internet in a decade (thanks uBlock) - so I'm not sure if there's some ubiquitous misleading ads I'm missing.

You may not even need a VPN to get around censorship, ISPs implementing legally mandated site blocks often only bother to enforce them at the DNS level so you can trivially bypass them by using an encrypted DNS resolver.

Encrypted DNS resolvers aren't trivial[0] for the ~99% of people who don't even know what they are, though.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Doesn't Firefox default to eDNS these days? I don't think it can get much more trivial than that

In the UK, at least, it isn't the default (because of "the children"/"terrorism"). But it's still just a setting in Firefox/Chrome to change (and I guess in Edge too).

Changing the "secure dns" option on their phone/computer is probably easier than installing a VPN app, tbh.

Even just using a different DNS can be enough. A certain popular movie uploader is/was blocked by my ISP at the DNS level but worked fine once I changed to OpenDNS.

If only the Great Firewall were so easy. ExpressVPN seems to be "OK" once/if it connects but it's not very fast when websites load megabytes of crap via a bazillion tiny requests (which is a problem in any bandwidth-limited and/or high-latency environment: use your browser tools to simulate a slow connection, website devs!).

Use a browser with DOH. Even works against corporate censorship.

renting a car - better rate if you are local.

Hmm… I’m going to try that. Thanks traveler.

Also plane tickets. It was less than half the price for me to buy Peruvian tickets in soles from LATAM than to shop on the equivalent site in USD

Damn. I was wondering why my tickets from Juliaca to Lima were so expensive.

I found the opposite when renting a car at the airport.

Renting a car in Belgium from the Canadian website is cheaper than renting the same car on the Belgian website.

I have mine always on for privacy. Is there a reason to not use it? The extra latency is close to 0 just use an exit node in the same city. Why should I donate all my browsing data to my ISP ?

ISP routing, throttling

There's another use case (and is why I primarily pay for one, mostly due to being too geographically mobile to want to set up a bunch of VPS around the US): bypassing throttling on low-cost pay-as-you-go MVNO networks.

I use Visible (pre-paid Verizon), and they very clearly deprioritize, say, youtube when things get crowded. I turn on my VPN and all of a sudden I can play 1080p no problem.

If you change your TTL you can fix that permanently without a VPN