-Lots of people use commercial vpns for the wrong reasons and expect too much from them in terms of privacy, anonymity, and security.
-Commercial vpns rarely have very any[1] trustworthy qualities.
-If you are hermit-level disciplined and never rely on (export MEANIES=) sketchy ISP, governments, or airport or cafe wifi to access the internet in an appropriately private way wrt the info exchanged (I would hugely envy your ability to evaluate this with much certainty), you have no need of a commercial vpn.
But as far as I can tell:
There are many good uses for commercial vpns in both "pretty good" customized private networks as well as best-case hardened access [2].
Even without other nodes, a commercial vpn has its use if one cannot avoid using a sketchy ISP or public wifi network. Unless the consolidation of sketchy internet entities is much much worse than I have seen evidence for and the commercial vpn is at least as trustable as the unavoidable sketchy network, it still provides the advantage of being singular. Better to have to deal with one sketchy commercial vpn than more than one of $MEANIES.
Some well-informed reasons to use a commercial vpn in a quite private customized network regardless of the more basic above factor:
- Reliable access to better things like tor among providers who block them.
- Minimizing public requests to and therefore risk of discovery and vandalism of personal private infrastructure. Think of cloud services you can host on your own more securely than a commercial provider of that service. EG one on your home network with more sensitive killswitches (if nothing else) than most commercial services can provide. You would probably still do better to use a commercial vpn than visit your home IP from $MEANIES even if [3] just to make the inconvenience of vandalism less frequent.
------- (I'm less sure about this part.) If the extra hop over an untrustable entity is really an extra liability (then you should use measures like inter-packet arrival time obfuscation and frequent hardware-level rebuilds of the customized network, and) then maybe the problem is already bad enough those two entities are in cahoots anyways so they could find out if they cared.
- Probably more?
Not a professional. Look forward to learning nuance or being proven completely wrong.
Edits:
[1] any not many
[2] if no alternative to one of $MEANIES is available
Some true facts:
-Lots of people use commercial vpns for the wrong reasons and expect too much from them in terms of privacy, anonymity, and security.
-Commercial vpns rarely have very any[1] trustworthy qualities.
-If you are hermit-level disciplined and never rely on (export MEANIES=) sketchy ISP, governments, or airport or cafe wifi to access the internet in an appropriately private way wrt the info exchanged (I would hugely envy your ability to evaluate this with much certainty), you have no need of a commercial vpn.
But as far as I can tell:
There are many good uses for commercial vpns in both "pretty good" customized private networks as well as best-case hardened access [2].
Even without other nodes, a commercial vpn has its use if one cannot avoid using a sketchy ISP or public wifi network. Unless the consolidation of sketchy internet entities is much much worse than I have seen evidence for and the commercial vpn is at least as trustable as the unavoidable sketchy network, it still provides the advantage of being singular. Better to have to deal with one sketchy commercial vpn than more than one of $MEANIES.
Some well-informed reasons to use a commercial vpn in a quite private customized network regardless of the more basic above factor:
- Reliable access to better things like tor among providers who block them.
- Minimizing public requests to and therefore risk of discovery and vandalism of personal private infrastructure. Think of cloud services you can host on your own more securely than a commercial provider of that service. EG one on your home network with more sensitive killswitches (if nothing else) than most commercial services can provide. You would probably still do better to use a commercial vpn than visit your home IP from $MEANIES even if [3] just to make the inconvenience of vandalism less frequent.
------- (I'm less sure about this part.) If the extra hop over an untrustable entity is really an extra liability (then you should use measures like inter-packet arrival time obfuscation and frequent hardware-level rebuilds of the customized network, and) then maybe the problem is already bad enough those two entities are in cahoots anyways so they could find out if they cared.
- Probably more?
Not a professional. Look forward to learning nuance or being proven completely wrong.
Edits:
[1] any not many
[2] if no alternative to one of $MEANIES is available
[3]