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).
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).