To show how much risk you take by not using VPN: Putin made a law that forbids the use of VPN in Russia. It shows that VPN is making it difficult for them to see what people are doing on internet, and also that they are spying everybody everwhere all the time. VPN makes it possible to see how politicians are manipulating the people as the cannot block info they don't want you to see. It also shows how "democratic" dictator Putin is. The three countries that block almost everything on internet and try to block VPN totally are: Russia North Korea China It is remarkable that these three countries are run by dictators. There seems to be a link between dictators and banning VPN.
So most of your points for using a VPN are political. Let's say I live in the West and I don't intend to overthrow the government, and my emails are about lolcats and what to get for relatives' birthdays. Tell me again, why a VPN makes me more secure against hacking? Specially at home assuming I live in a nice neighbourhood where not everybody is a college geek wanting to see my vacation pictures of fishermen on the pier.
You clearly don't understand the use of VPN. It is not political, it is about safety and privacy. If you feel good without VPN just do as you wish. People go to nice universities in respectable areas, but still get shot. They think like you: why me? What you think is irrelevant, what others might think is relevant, as they will or will not act. Burgulars go to your nice neigbourhood to steal as in ghetto's it is to dangerous and there is not much valuable to steal, except from drugs and guns. It is not because you think there is nothing that might attract criminals or hackers that they don't come. It is even possible that they already hacked you and you even don't know it. At least the NSA has your emails and maybe much more. If you use wifi in your safe home you can already get hacked by someone walking in your street.
Lets say I run a network at a public location (coffee shop, hotel, conference, whatever). You're connected to my network (wired or wifi, doesn't matter). I can monitor all of your non-encrypted traffic. I can even modify that traffic. I can also attempt to trick you in to trick you in to accepting my SSL certificate which would allow me to also see and modify encrypted traffic. For example, I could do a man in the middle attack (MITM) on you where you try to access elitetrader.com, but it's actually my proxy server where I'm modifying traffic. Granted elitetrader.com uses HTTPS, so your browser will try to verify my certificate (and fail). It will pop up a message asking if you want to accept the certificate / proceed anyway. If you do, then as far as I'm concerned, the site is no longer encrypted (because I can decrypt and modify the connection). So now you're logged in to elitetrader.com, but it's passing through my server. As such I now send fake or modified data to you (maybe you don't care). I can slo use your cookie to effectively log in to your account (even when you're not connected to my network anymore, at least until your cookie expires) and post a trading journal where you do something hugely embarasing like call a top/bottom of the S&P every single day or go to send hundreds of private sexy messages to female traders and instead find you've already done that. From my perspective the main value of a VPN is when using untrusted networks and accessing non-encrypted sites. The benefits in general are: * preventing snooping (government or creepy IT guy) * preventing traffic hijacking / modification of non-encrypted traffic * hiding IP from service operators So while I understand snooping is not a concern of yours, perhaps traffic modification and ability to log in to sites as you is a concern (granted more and more sites are encrypted these days so this is less of an issue).
@schweiz I don't think complete privacy was the ops goal. I think he just wanted something basic to protect him from the average joe on free/public wifi. Most VPNs will serve this purpose. I'm sure you can find some truly secure VPNs, but I am going to guess they dont' have too many access points meaning you will have high latency. In general I would say its a trade off between security and latency. You just need to find a balance that works for you.
my VPN lots of servers available with, for me at least, acceptable ping and bandwith. another one in another country
It all comes down to your what your threat profile looks like. I wish I could have complete privacy, but I know it doesn't exist. I have a simple profile and I keep it at that. What the general public doesn't understand is that we are all screwed with regards to privacy and have been for some time. The NSA, corporates, etc have been collecting our info for decades. Everyone has choices to make with regards to how much you are willing to give over to the "services providers" of hardware, software, cloud services, etc. VPN's have been industry standard for enterprise for longer than I have been of working age. "Don't be evil" and motto's like it are not something that companies can hide behind any longer because the cat is out of the bag. I should probably be using a VPN anyway, but because I am trading on the road and going to be working on new trade ideas, etc, it is just time to find a good one. I appreciate all of the info you guys provide, I am a frequent visitor, but don't post enough. This community is a great source of info. Anyway, enough of the fluffy stuff. I was looking at NordVPN and the reddit site looked like they have had a few issues that made me pause. Have you guys tried Nord? I know every VPN company is gong to be a bit different even down to the quality of what they are providing. I will have a look at PIA (They do look very solid) and Proton as well. It may take a few days to do some testing, but at least now I have a few options that I can compare realistically. The others I have looked at are: IPVanish ExpressVPN PureVPN OVPN.com The VPN Reviews Reddit takes a lot of work to get through and I sometimes question the quality of the posts. As a bonus, I am reminded of a meeting I had at a coffee shop in the midwest about three years ago. I noticed a college age gentleman laughing while on his laptop a couple of tables over. I just thought he was watching porn / Youtube videos, but after walking by I noticed what I assume he was hacking patrons using the open wifi.
Hold on there, let's say I trade from home using Comcast as ISP. Everything else you said is irrelevant to my case...Also consider that a VPN could be a government honeypot or also could be hacked.
Maybe someone living with you (wife/husband or children) is working for the government... Or Comcast is a government honeypot... You really have no clue what VPN is.
...haven't provided an argument. I use a VPN for watching movies, let's just say... But no, I don't need it against hacking when I am at home. If on location that is a different question but that wasn't what we disagree on.