Countless online creators we all follow have promoted a VPN of some sort in the intros or outros of their videos, stressing the importance of encrypting your data and protecting sensitive information.
Always made me wonder if these VPNs really are as necessary as they’re made out to be. I’ve gone 20 plus years without one and nothing bad has really ever happened to me on the internet. (Hopefully.) My social media accounts have never been hacked and my bank accounts haven’t been stolen from.
Do we all need to get VPNs if we can afford them or do they really just cater more to people who do specific things online that require that extra level of security?
Do we all need to get VPNs if we can afford them
No.
Only if you have something to hide or visit shady sites you don’t trust.
And there are free options. Windscribe lets you get 10GB per month through their VPN for free (wich is more than enough if you use it only when necessary)
A normal user doesn’t need them besides for pirating on peer 2 peer networks or accessing region locked content or hiding from trolls who might try to get your city and state from public IP.
I guess it depends on how private you like certain information to be. You know how some click bait articles and ads mention the city you are in? That’s because your IP gives your location away. When you use a VPN they don’t get this information about you, because the VPN redirects you and they can only see the IP of the server you are redirected to.
If you have an online stalker I would also advise you to get one, makes it harder for the online stalker to become a real world stalker.
I think if you aren’t pirating or trying to watch American Netflix you should be fine 
Given that most internet traffic is now encrypted via SSL (i.e. https), the need for VPN is less than it used to be (any internet traffic that isn’t secured by SSL is essentially as secure as sending the data via a postcard).
The main reasons for using VPN nowadays are:
a) to hide your IP address (e.g. if you wanted to pretend to be in a different country, or wanted to prevent someone knowing your location).
b) prevent anyone local to you viewing the web addresses you are accessing (even with SSL, the URL you are accessing is still publicly viewable).
c) encrypt any traffic that isn’t protected by SSL.
Of course, one thing to bear in mind is that VPN only protects communication between you and the VPN host; any traffic between the VPN host and the computer you are trying to access is not protected.
My social media accounts have never been hacked and my bank accounts haven’t been stolen from.
A VPN really doesn’t do anything to prevent that. Most traffic on the internet is already encrypted, so people can’t read your bank details or social media passwords whether or not you are using a VPN. However, they can see what websites you are visiting - when you use a VPN, all that other people see is that you are connected to the VPN service. Using a VPN also means your connection will appear to come from the VPN server, so the website you are visiting does not see your real IP address.
There’s a few reasons why you might want to use a VPN:
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For privacy reasons - either to hide your IP address from the site you are visiting or to hide your activity from your ISP or others on the network.
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To circumvent internet censorship or region locking
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To connect to a corporate network. Many businesses will use a VPN to allow employees to securely access their servers when working away from the office.
I personally think that vpn is needed only in case you can’t get an access to some websites which you want. You can install it and forget about it until you will want to visit some websites which require an access with vpn. I believe that it’s a very useful tool nowadays and it shouldn’t be unerestimated. Of course, government claims that everything that is done for population is only for their safety, nevertheless we can’t exclude that government often follows some vested interests. They conceal it, but we know everything. There are some people who are against of vpn and consume only licensed content and it’s their right actually.
