Curious to what everyone’s thoughts are on using a VPN service to protect their traffic from their ISPs. Went on travel recently and ended up signing up for a VPN service to use when I connected to public hotspots. Got me thinking if I should use this service on a regular basis for my home network as well to protect my privacy from my ISP.
Edit: one area that concerns me is online gaming. My kids love to game and I’ve been hearing and reading more of swating using IP addresses. One of the reasons for VPN would be to protect our real IP.
Your examples are decent ones. You seem to be well aware of what a VPN does and doesn’t do.
Obfuscating your home IP is a valid use, and it also prevents the other side from tracking your movements as you move from location to location and thus IP to IP. If you always use the same VPN exit server, you always seem to visit from the same place.
As long as you’re aware you can still be finger printed in other ways, and it doesn’t provide anonymity on its own, it can be a useful tool.
There is a whole post about routers on Nord’s subreddit about setting up a VPN on a router, advantages and disadvantages.
When it comes to gaming, not only connection speeds will be slower with a VPN, but the latency (ping) will increase too. That is not ideal for gaming at all.
Your just transferring your activity data from your ISP to your VPN provider. I trust my ISP more then some third party VPN service. Plus as.other mentioned you get a bottle neck for games and streaming. So unless you have a need to change your appeared location for geo restrictions it’s not the best idea.
On travel, yes it can protection. Public wifi isn’t as scary as it used to be especially with https almost everywhere. That said I still use one, tailscale, that exits from my house through my ISP. Coupled with secure DNS this gives me a pretty nice setup.
I think the privacy benefits of a VPN are over exaggerated in advertisements. Yes, ISPs can see what domain names you access (if you use their DNS), and what servers you connect to, and what you send and receive. However the send and receive is encrypted to only be readable by the opposite end of the vast majority of sites nowadays. Even scam sites can get an HTTPS-compatible security certificate easily… I have a free one through Let’s Encrypt to let me not have to bother with self-signed certificates for anything.
If you frequently use free wifi, there are some dangers, like the network being configured with a malicious DNS, or something in the network trying to access your device. However if you use the public network setting in Windows, that limits the options for attackers to access your device via a firewall. I’m sure MacOS has similar functionality, and smartphones are pretty locked down in that regard. Malicious DNS will likely trigger an alert, either that the site directed you away from HTTPS, or that something is weird with the site’s certificate.
As far as being attacked FROM the internet, on a private or public network, there’s already multiple barriers against that. Most routers have a fairly decent firewall built-in, and for IPv4 a router just won’t know which device on your network an outside attack is supposed to go to (unless something on your network is already compromised to be able to use UPnP to tell your router where to go).
So in all, if you are the vast majority of users (from novice to power user) there’s really only very small benefit to using a VPN. If you want or need complete control over what your ISP sees (such as skirting an oppressive country’s censorship) a VPN can be useful, even a very literal lifesaver. But excluding that, the only tangible benefit is bypassing region-locked internet content (and you can still be caught on that if Netflix for example notices you travelling a thousand miles in a few minutes or a thousand people all on the same network who are also travelling quickly).
Edit: saw OP’s edit. I didn’t think of that… but to see someone else’s IP in a game generally needs a hacked game client/console, and someone’s IP is only going to give a general location with publicly-available tools. However, if that IP is provided to law enforcement and enough information is forged to get law enforcement to demand a location from your ISP, it is feasible to be swatted with just an IP. The odds are very low unless you’re notorious (like a streamer) but non-zero… a VPN might be worth the money for peace of mind on that front, but you gotta trust that the VPN provider doesn’t log and won’t rat you out without a valid warrant (hopefully long enough that you’re no longer on the same endpoint).
And even if you do change your DNS, they are still routing the traffic when you connect to anything on the internet. So they still can see everywhere you go.
Unless you’re using a VPN, they they just see everything going to the VPN address. But I don’t see a reason to use a VPN at home unless you are doing something shady.