VPNs Are Very Unserious These Days

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
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I can only imagine the number of customers they lose because they absolutely don’t care about serious marketing. :melting_face:

Luckily, I don’t care that they love to troll. :disguised_face:

PS: Got this as an email with a YT link that didn’t include any link tracking. A simple thing, but also a major difference between a company that respects your privacy and one that wants every bit of info they can get from you. :vulcan_salute:

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The ad seems very much inspired by the internet culture surrounding it. Some people enjoy it, some don’t. I, personally, won’t enjoy the overly serious tone. I don’t really enjoy this either, but I don’t enjoy it for other reasons.

Also, I believe this will be a hot take here, but you don’t need a VPN unless:

  • You want to pirate (includes region locking because media companies are absolutely great :skull:)
  • You live in a totalitarian country and your access to the greater internet is restricted without a VPN

I would venture to guess most here don’t need either. Perhaps if you use public Wi-Fi, it might make more sense, but I would, personally, rather cut the need to access public Wi-Fi in the first place.

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It’s not just media companies. It’s companies in general.

You go to a website, its bots detect that you are not from a preferred region, they remove access to something you want or need.

One doesn’t need to be doing anything illegal to want or need a VPN. One just needs to not live in a country/region of privilege. Privilege here is situational.

Examples:

  • Accessing Spotify or Netflix from different regions gives you access to different content.
  • This is also true for websites like Sky Sports — if I access it while using a US IP, some things are blocked, usually video.
  • For one of the clients I work with, if I access their service from a UK IP, I get caught in a temporary loop of “Are you a robot?” checks.

And if I don’t use a VPN, there are a few websites I can just forget about using.

  • The site bots will assume I speak a language that I don’t.
  • They give me a version of the site where I might as well not use it.
  • Or they won’t load the site at all.

Privilege.

The argument that people who use VPNs are criminals, which is essentially what you alluded to, is the same flawed argument that people who want privacy have something to hide and/or are criminals.

PS: I say “website/site” but it applies to apps and services in general.

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I have Mullvad (one of the only worthwhile VPNs) always enabled on all my devices not because I’m some sort of criminal mastermind but because, along with many other precautions, I want my online identity to be as untraceable as possible. So many tracking companies follow you everywhere you go and make an online profile of you without you even knowing, all through metadata. It’s insane I even have to do this, but that is the apocalyptic state of the internet nowadays.

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Yeah, it is BS. It’s why piracy keeps winning more and more ground.

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There’s a famous, old, possibly apocryphal quote that comes to mind every time I see a “nothing to hide means nothing to fear” suggestion:

If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.

In my country it’s now law that all of your internet activity is logged and recorded for a minimum of 12 months, and while it hasn’t been fully rolled out yet because surprise surprise it’s really not that easy to log and store that much information about an entire country there are at least two major national ISPs under gag orders testing the technology on their customers.

I have nothing to hide, but all the same I prefer to give them no lines at all :smile:

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Remember when tracking you and selling your data for advertising purposes was considered a virus (e.g. BonziBuddy)?

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Another!