Here is my beef. I'm pro-VPN. The ability to gain more control over who can track your online communication is a net-positive to me, personally and philosophically. However, I can't justify their existence from a utilitarian perspective.
Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:
- Very low: Protecting political activists and dissidents
- Low: Circumvention of overzealous blocking and surveillance
- Low-to-Medium: Hiding abusive and malicious behavior
- Medium: Additional layers of trust and network security (mostly business related, which makes it tangental to the consumer VPN market)
- VERY High: Enabling piracy and avoiding geo-content restrictions (no judgment on good-vs-bad, just asserting magnitude)
I believe that management at VPN companies are extremely pro-consumer protection (if only because their cash flows depend on this). I absolutely trust the system and network administrators. They don't want to track or look at the data flows because the odds of seeing something nasty is quite high. I have a fair amount of professional industry experience to back this up.
So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.
Age-gating VPNs fails, becausw it probably won't stop determined piracy or abuse, but it will make privacy tools feel abnormal, regulated, and less available to ordinary users and families
Practically speaking, when I look at the actual number of people affected by VPN I estimate that:
I believe that management at VPN companies are extremely pro-consumer protection (if only because their cash flows depend on this). I absolutely trust the system and network administrators. They don't want to track or look at the data flows because the odds of seeing something nasty is quite high. I have a fair amount of professional industry experience to back this up.So... conundrum! If I take the position that piracy-related stuff isn't a net drag and that business VPN use is fundamentally a separate beast, VPNs in this context are hard to justify.