Just my use cases:

• Piracy
• I don’t need my ISP knowing everything I do regardless of legality.
• I don’t need dickhead network admins knowing everything I do on their network, regardless of legality.
• I don’t need every website knowing my identity regardless of legality.
• newpipe always takin’ 'bout some goddamn “sign in to confirm u no bot” and hell no I’m just gonna reroll my location and oh look that worked.

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

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

I use vpns primarily for circumventing geofencing

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.

Might be useful for self-hosting when you’re away from home and don’t want to open your ports up to public internet traffic. Also whistle blowing is kind of in public interest. And circumventing regional censorship. Depending on the country the latter two might not be fully legal but it’s best if it stays this way. Hiding yourself from prying eyes of ISPS google and so on is also fully legal and important as you can be geolocated often to a few hundred meters without it.

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.

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?

Privacy should be the default, not the exception.

You could be another user resisting surveillance, or another user contributing to it.

The choice is yours.

Here’s a free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn

As a private person doing nothing illegal, is there value in having curtains on your windows ?

It’s not a question of whether there are things I’d like to hide, and why I want to hide them. It’s simply a natural desire to only disclose my personal affairs to specific parties for specific purposes.

Suppose I go to the pharmacy for some paracetamol and they ask to see a list of all the people I’ve emailed in the last 6 months, or at the supermarket I need to share my search history for the last 6 months.

There’s nothing illegal or anything I would be really embarrassed about, but it would be absolutely absurd. That’s the way the modern internet is built though.

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.

While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.

That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.

The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that suddenly illegal thing in the past.

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.

Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :

There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.

…

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.