When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide

But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi

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.

Doing nothing illegal, today…

Yes. Absolutely. Privacy is for everyone.

You are assuming that the things legal and illegal today will continue to align with your morality. “I don’t do anything bad” only holds value while you and your governing body share beliefs.

What if tomorrow you disagree? Suddenly there would be a long history of potentially incriminating internet history associated with you. What if it’s for something you can’t even control, such as “using the internet while female” in a society that recently banned women from using the internet?

This level of paranoia shouldn’t be required yet look at the state of the world.

A VPN doesn’t just allow you to change your location. It’s a tunnel between you and someone you trust (a VPN provider). All your traffic shows up as originating from the trusted partners address do that it cannot be traced back to you. They offer this to lots of customers and if your VPN provider is worth their salt, anonymizes these interactions so that they can’t even tell people who did what.

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.

There’s value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.

Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.

Most VPNs won’t even work for daily browsing as far as I’m aware. You’ll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.

Personally, for generic browsing, I’m not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I’m accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they’ll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.

There’s also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.

Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.

And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don’t think it’s necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).

I currently use the TOR browser when I’m searching for things I’d rather for-profit companies didn’t know, like health care information.

I have considered getting a VPN because I live in Texas, where a lot of perfectly legal content has been blocked “to protect the children,” and because I know my political searches will be turned over to the government if Trump or Abbot asks for them.

If you’re in the UK, suddenly being in a different country can be beneficial if you don’t feel like having your face scanned or giving away your credit card details before engaging in some self-care.

Yes, even if you trust people in positions of power with access to that data which there are tons of evidence to not do that, laws change and the people enforcing the laws change. Not using a VPN is telling your ISP and potentially thousands of advertisers and dozens of governments everything you search for, private messages if you’re not using a peer to peer encrypted messaging app, and all of the meta data indicating where you are & when you sleep or are alone. Intelligence agencies run programs like those leaked (not just the US but definitely including them) and when there was little to no political backlash when those were revealed you can assume they are doing much worse now.

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” - Snowden

Either everyone’s data is public and transparent or nobody’s is, partial selection is just asking to be used as a weapon against the people being snooped on.

I use mine to maintain control of my home server while out of the house

Yes, definitely! If you are on public wifi, work wifi, or your home router is compromised (more likely than you think), the VPN can protect your traffic from being intercepted. It can also help you get around censorship if you live in a place where that is a problem.

Privacy is also important, even if you aren’t doing anything wrong, because it’s not just police watching, but all sorts of companies and individuals who will gladly harvest and sell your data, put you at risk, and give you nothing for it but trouble when your identity gets stolen or something.

I mean you literally need it in the UK to access lemmy.zip locally and imgur.

Unfortunately we are living in times where even the most sane countries are getting to the point where completely reasonable things may be seen as illegal, or used against you, in the future.

It’s not unreasonable to imagine that insurance companies/banks may soon (if not already) buy your internet traffic to get a profile of you. If that profile matches some risk factors, higher interest rates or premiums could be a thing.

Even the UK has started flexing authoritarian lately with the Palestine action proscription and suppression of protest. There is certainly a trend in modern politics to try to track people online, and they are starting with pornography to normalise it, using CSAM as an excuse to enact more extreme legislation.

Immigration and border authorities are also beginning to expand digital backgrounds for travellers or immigrants.

It’s not necessarily about what is illegal today, in your current location, but it’s about what might be considered illegal or “bad” in the future and weaponised against you.

Don’t assume that your current situation will always be the case. The right to privacy is not for people to do illegal things, the right to privacy is to protect you against authoritarian governments if/when they may intersect with your life.