[qikInNdOutReply]

Its funny, how the VPN providers basically become the avatars of the old anarchic web and the constant buisness and government overreach makes them ever stronger. Its basically a old "freedom" tax.

[quickthrower2]

Tor exists though fwiw

[Etheryte]

Tor exists, but realistically the overhead of using Tor is not acceptable to the general public. As long as Tor is sufficiently slow compared to everyday traffic it will remain a niche use case. A good VPN on the other hand gives you at least a little bit of privacy without much of a cost.

[KyeRussell]

That’s incredibly generous.

The VPN industry is deserving of its bad reputation. Collecting user data in clear contravention of their TOS. Using hacked boxes as VPN endpoints to get people onto residential IP ranges. And whatever else.

I’m very confident in my completely baseless assertion that most people that use a “public” VPN are either bypassing geographical restrictions on a streaming service, or doing something outright shady.

There’s a reason that it’s common for VPN providers to take cash and cryptocurrency, as this one does. It does precisely zilch to thwart the sort of tracking that affects the vast vast vast majority of Internet users.

The VPN industry isn’t being propped up by nerds indulging their crypto libertarian / anarchism fetish but are just spending their time reading Hacker News (with JS off, obviously). There just aren’t enough of them.

[catminou]

Don't forget the VPN providers who turn their customers machines as egress nodes without making it obvious they're doing so.