Hello there, in this video I want to talk about the absolutely useless idea of using a VPN for privacy on the internet. And this applies to basically 99.999% of people. VPNs are so relentlessly shilled, not just by tech people on YouTube, but even normy channels are always hawking some stupid VPN that's paying them to advertise their service. So I want to talk about why VP- because people ask me, oh what VPN should I use? Blah blah blah. They're stupid. They're basically all scams. And even if they're not scams, they're basically in, I don't know, accidentally honeypots. Let's just say that. So I want you to get a bird's eye view of what a VPN actually is. Okay. And I'm going to, I also want to explain why do VPNs actually exist because they don't exist for the, they're not actually providing a service. I'm going to answer that question as well. But so when you get a bird's eye view of what a VPN is, ultimately it's a dude saying, okay, I have this server farm. Here's what you should do. Oh, you care about privacy. Here's what you should do. You should route all of your inner, you should pay to route all of your internet traffic through my computer. Okay. Now right off the bat, that should sound pretty suspicious for multiple reasons. Firstly, you know, it's often compared to, oh, don't let your ISB see what you're looking at. So your internet service provider, normally when you're just using it normally, of course they see when you connect to a different site. They see that you've established an HTTPS connection to Facebook or something like that, right? Now they don't actually see because everything is basically encrypted online nowadays. They don't see what you're doing on Facebook. They just see that you're connecting, you're sending this amount of data, stuff like that. So the VPN says, oh, don't let your ISPC that let us see that. Pay to let us see it. Okay. So this is problematic for multiple reasons. And firstly, you are not, you are objectively losing privacy. Your privacy exposure is no less like you're still exposing what sites you connect to to someone. You're just exposing them to someone you're now paying. And actually you're increasing your metadata footprint because now both your ISP and this other organization, you know, they have some amount of metadata about you. They don't know exactly what you're doing, right? So you've objectively made things worse. In fact, it gets even worse than that because it goes without saying that these VPSs, firstly, they're constrained by a lot of laws. Okay. So gag rules and stuff like that in the United States and in other places where the government can come and ask them for data. And they're not actually allowed to tell you that the government has done that, right? So they're not even allowed to be, I don't know, inform you of what's going on. And of course, obviously if you have a bunch of people who are privacy interested, which could mean suspicious things, aggregating all of their information in this one business, that actually makes things really convenient if you're someone who's trying to track people, right? So Normies just let their ISP have their information. But if you have these companies that have your information, that's even worse. And what's worse than that is all of these companies, unless you're paying with Monero, okay? You have an account with them that has your name and it has to have some kind of credit card information and all that kind of stuff. So all of that extra information is now leaking, okay? Your metadata footprint is significantly worse if you have a VPN, okay? Now are there some times to use a VPN? I will say in the United States, absolutely not, okay? And there's a reason for that. So obviously some people use VPNs to bypass block lists or like block lists, maybe of the place they happen to be or like a country or something. People talk about, oh, I live in Iran, so I use a VPN. And sure, a VPN, just because you're routing your traffic through someone else, yeah, you can access other sites if those VPNs, I mean, VPNs are often blocked. But at that point, you're really just using the VPN as a proxy, okay? So you could just use a proxy, you could use on your enrouting or some kind of like dark web stuff to get around it. Now, there might be a reason that VPNs are more convenient. I'm not actually quite sure. But I say that's useless in the United States and Europe because our censorship here is not the same as censorship there. Like if the United States wants a website taken off the internet, they can take it off. Iran does not have that power. So they block sites or China block sites or Russia block sites. The United States, if they want a site taken off the internet, it will be off the internet. So functionally speaking, what that means for us Americans or a lot of Europeans and people who are basically vassals of the United States, that basically means there's no reason. Like you don't need a VPN to bypass stuff because your government has already taken it off line more or less, right? There are exceptions to that, obviously. But so what's a point of VPNs? Like why is it all like a big scheme? Is it all a big purposeful honey pot? I don't necessarily think so. Here I think is the real reason VPNs are so relentlessly shield and why there are so many VPN companies. And I think it's because nowadays a lot of companies just as an investment, they're like, okay, technology is big. Let's just buy up a bunch of servers. Let's just buy up a bunch of equipment and have it in a big farm. And the nice thing about VPNs is it's this really easy way. Like if you can sell it to people, if you can tell them, oh, it's about privacy and all this kind of stuff. So way to basically get free money, you're just routing internet traffic through your server farm. It's not anything too difficult to do. You just have accounts for people to pay and you're just, I mean, you're getting free money just to like route traffic through you. That's totally, it's basically free. You don't have to do anything complicated. You're not actually offering like a service with like a really difficult customer, you know, relationships or something like that. It's a very easy thing to do. So in my opinion, I think most of these VPN companies, those that are not like literally rural honeypots, I think there probably are some that are literal honeypots. But those that are not are probably just innocently like, well, you know, we want, we have this server farm. What are we going to do with it? This is basically the easiest thing we could possibly do. The only hard sell is just like getting people to like buy it, like to use the service. But luckily, because they're, their costs are so low, this is why all of these companies are going to YouTubers. They're going to other people and offering them like just insane amounts of money just so they can shield their products. Okay. But ultimately, again, VPNs, I just have to say there might be some use case in bypassing, you know, if you can't use a normal proxy, you want to want something a little more special, it might be a purpose for those people in countries like that. But in general, for a normal consumer in the United States and Europe, VPNs are just snake oil. They're useless stuff that if anything is making things worse for you, making things more difficult to connect to the internet and the way that you want. And they're not, they're just not offering you any privacy. That's all that I can say. They're making, they're making your metadata footprint bigger and they're just a hassle. So that's why I don't recommend them. Now of course, again, if you might be one of those very small number of people who needs a VPN for this purpose, but I hope you understand what I'm saying. I'm not saying that I'm just saying that they're so overhyped and useless for most people. So yeah, that's about it. Don't use these things. You're not, you're literally like wasting your time. I just hate it when I see a normie who doesn't understand technology using one of these things because like PewDiePie put them onto it. It's just ridiculous. All right. Goodbye.