Personal VPN pros and cons

[HCHTech]

Does anyone have a pre-written piece on the pros and cons of using a personal VPN? It's one topic I've been avoiding, but I'm getting more and more questions from customers, so I'm in the process of putting something together.

I've always put personal VPNs in the 'tin foil hat' category, and don't use one myself. Of course, I'm not from a country that blocks content, so I have that luxury, I guess. I won't recommend something I don't use myself and believe in, so I may be in an ethical corner here.

So generically:

Pros:

• Your traffic is encrypted
• Your ISP can't see what you're doing*
• Websites can't determine your location, so ad-targeting won't work as they want
• Your IP address isn't exposed to the websites you visit

Cons:

• *It will slow down your connection
• If the VPN drops, your computer will default back to non-encrypted connection, and all of the "Pros" go away until you re-establish the VPN connection
• The VPN vendor knows at least something about you, and could be compelled to turn that information over to law-enforcement or governments
• Complicated - most users will not understand the details and won't be able to troubleshoot it if it stops working (further, most users will not even know if it stops working, I'd wager)
• Common services can and do block or punish VPN connections - Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc.

*unless they can - like when the VPN connection drops

What did I misunderstand or forget?

 

[Markverhyden]

Since the vast majority of app use on a computer these days by consumers is a web browser a web proxy is pretty simple.

 

[Diggs]

I have an account with PIA. No logs, no names, no emails on file. There are times I like to be anonymous on the web or need to appear to be from one of the 25+ countries they have servers in. I should add they have never dropped a connection. I tend to use a sanitized Linux machine for VPN duties, not my day-to-day drivers.

 

[trevm999]

Since the vast majority of app use on a computer these days by consumers is a web browser a web proxy is pretty simple.

And probably the majority of other windows apps are using winhttp

netsh winhttp set proxy <proxy>:<port>

 

[trevm999]

Another VPN con is you often get poor IP reputation from IPs in their range getting flagged as suspicious. So all of a sudden you are doing captchas everywhere and cloudflare checking delays on pretty much every site

 

[Markverhyden]

Another VPN con is you often get poor IP reputation from IPs in their range getting flagged as suspicious. So all of a sudden you are doing captchas everywhere and cloudflare checking delays on pretty much every site

Yes. And that has many issues. I'm working on an issue with customer. They're commercial RE brokers and use loopnet.com for business. They swear up and down they are doing nothing out of the ordinary but all of a sudden they started getting Access Denied when accessing from their office. As expected loopnet's helpless desk is useless. I can't get them to tell me what specifically triggered the blockage because they are paying a third party to handle that. The block expires in 5 days but the lack of access is killing them. I've tried all kinds of proxy things but they have not been working most likely because all of the IP's are on some black list or another.. So I'm researching spinning up a cloud VM to handle that.

 

[Diggs]

Ummm - You need to review your facts a bit. PIA VPN is available out of 33 countries with Hong King and Romania being my favorites (none are "Eyes" countries). ...and no, you can't be traced back to your ISP just because you opened an account somewhere with PIA somewhere else in the world. There is no linkage available between your sign up and your VPN activity out of Egypt, UAE or Singapore. In turn, your VPN stream is encrypted. Not something that can be easily deciphered if even possible to hand over. I've been using VPNs for 15+ years and seen quite a few come and go.