[greyskull]

I have a very general question. What do you folks use these VPNs for besides, say, privacy/security or circumventing content restrictions?

[jrootabega]

This applies more to VPN as a tunneling technology rather than an anonymity provider. But I don't want to share my personal IP address with everyone I interact with online. I don't currently care if, say, Hacker News or Reddit knows it, or really any big web platform where I'm not that interesting to them. But everyone and everything else? It could invite attacks, DOS, expose geographical information, social engineering targets, etc. A VPN at least gives you a layer of protection, and ideally one that you can throw away if anyone targets you. Once someone knows your main IP address, it probably can't be changed quickly, may be difficult to change it at all, and may even be impossible in some cases. It's a piece of knowledge you can't take back, so sharing it by default is bad, IMO.

So I guess that's just a security/privacy concern, but the key point is that you should be secure/private before you think you need it.

[johnklos]

I use it (Mullvad, specifically) to download videos I want to watch that online services make too onerous to purchase easily.

[quux]

My primary use case for a VPN is hiding BitTorrent traffic from my ISP.