Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.

It’s completely legal for me to watch 70s pornography while drinking hard liquor and painting pentagrams on my walls and sacrificing small animals to Baal.

I’m not going to videotape it and show my grandmother.

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Would you be fine with a corporation/government putting a camera in everyones house? It’s fine, since you’re not doing anything illegal, so there is really no problem. And think of how many crimes could be stopped. VPN is more about privacy than getting away with anything illegal. ISP’s collect all users browsing data and sells it off to the highest bidder. They sit between you and the services you want, so they see it all. With a VPN they know how much traffic there is, but they just know it is going through a VPN and nothing more

Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone’s windows?

I would recommend using it only in the programs that actually need it, but it will be useless, for example, for banks, stores like Amazon, and so on, if you’ve already given them all your location information. A VPN is useful for browsing the internet, messaging with family, exchanging crypto, and on social networks where you don’t share personal information. For now, we can create a separate identity while we still have the opportunity

Some things should be private. Some things should be secret. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, but simply because they’re yours and you want to keep them that way.

Everything you do in the internet is being shared with data brokers who then sell your info and you dont get a cut!

As a privacy enhancement even beyond hiding from ISPs, a VPN has value for the private person when they connect to a public Wi-Fi network and need protection from attackers.

The primary activity of a VPN, extending a private network over a public network, does not only have value for organizations, but for private people like you and me, too. E.g. you need remote access on your NAS with media or in general your devices without making them directly accessible from the internet.

But overall, it’s difficult to give you a definite answer, because it really depends on where you are from. E.g. in most European countries even bypassing geo-blocking won’t get you in trouble as they are regulating it within the EU in the first place, while on the other side in China most VPNs are prohibited in general.

I’m always using a proton vpn. As well as a hardened librewolf and default ironfox. I definitly get more captchas and there are some sites that don’t load up, but I have yet found a site that blocks me that I’d turn the vpn off for.

Somethings to note though:

I have been suspended from esty after buying stuff, likely from the vpn. I appealed but nothing has really happened.

Youtube can be a pain, I no longer use google accounts and I don’t bother using their captchs. I just shuffle around on my vpn until I’m no longer a bot.

Streaming; netflix is fine, though I stick to my home country normally.

I tried a couple of other with limited success, nowadays I only use netflix on my compy with a vanilla firefox

I think I tried Paramount and it wasn’t working out. But it may have been because of it not available in my contry or something.

Disney was givin me a lot of trouble, but I think I did get it to work on my phone with the vpn once. (Had to restart the phone with Disney+ disabled first, the it worked.)

Honesty it’s not that bad.
Also as I was writing this I was going list out my privacy set up, but I realized I think I’ve become meme.

It is not about illegal. It is more of “under the radar”.

• Say, you want to watch a video on youtube but it is geolocked? Start your VPN and BAM! It is not locked anymore.

• Want to tip your toes in selfhosting and Arr stack but government is grabbing torrent users by the balls? VPN will cover your back.

• Do not like your ISP to log your traffic to sell to marketers? Make them lose their minds not knowing what you do by routing traffic through VPN.

• Hate ads on Youtube? Change to Mongolia and you wont have ads on youtube anymore (uBO is actually better for that).

• Government wants your ID to visit adult content sites? VPN is on the case!

Also, as a side effect you are less likely to get hacked if you use VPN since all your activity comes from an IP address that is not associated with your device.

I am all up for privacy and I have tried to follow a lot of procedures for it but I have never used VPN (except TOR, which technically is not a VPN).

I actually appreciate the concept of VPN but I think how it is marketed is a bit over exaggeration. VPN is useful when you want to do something securely without the fear of being tracked, access things that are blocked by a tyrannical government, or if you want to watch shows in your region that is not available without VPN (one of the advertisement that VPN providers use). However, I do raise one of my eyebrow a bit on the scale of advertisement VPN put up. E.g. you cannot have not heard about Nord and Surfshark vpn (owned by the same company). I don’t want to complain about their service as they seem to be one of the best ones out there, and customers seem to be satisfied. But I am perplexed how aggressive their advertisement is. Also they make dubious claims in their ads that ASA (UK) had to step in. They also had their servers breached and exposes some private keys as well as some usernaems and passwords.

The same way I am perplexed about the level of advertisement of OperaGx “the gaming browser” and Honey.

I do trust ‘free vpn’ less that vpns.

Im not sure if it works but you might be able to buy some steam games for cheaper.

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”

It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.

For me, it’s when it’s convenient. Opera has a VPN built in, so why not? I’m not so much worried about the government. I’m more worried about website owners.