You want to know two secret truths that most commercial VPNs don’t want you to know? First,
they pay tons of money in the form of affiliate commissions to get people like me to list them as
“the best”. Every week I receive emails from new and existing VPN providers offering to
pay large sums of money to “review” their service and even larger sums of
money if I can promise to list them at the top of any best VPN list I create.
I’ve talked about it before just how corrupt this industry is, and if you’ve seen the video from Tom
Scott a few years ago, you know I’m not alone. Big name tech review websites like PCMag are
owned by the same company that owns the IPVanish, StrongVPN and other VPN services. And these guys
publish “best VPN” articles that rank very high in Google. Can you say conflict of interest?
The second secret that most VPNs don’t want you to know is that despite all the marketing,
a VPN is not really a privacy tool. It does hide your IP address and it does encrypt your
data so that your internet service provider can’t see what websites you’re visiting,
but at the end of the day, all you’re really doing is replacing your distrust in your ISP
with a blind trust in a VPN company that is likely very vague about who they are. And of course,
I’m not talking about corporate VPNs here, which are required to give you access to your company’s
intranet. I’m referring specifically to commercial VPNs targeted at individual users like you and me.
So what does this mean for you?
First things first, find somebody you trust who knows their stuff,
and follow their recommendations. Unfortunately, if you search on Google for the best VPN,
the results you see are not unbiased reviews, they’re simply websites that are really good
at ranking on Google, something known as SEO. They promote the VPN services
with the highest paying commissions to help pay for the links needed to rank them high.
Now, I challenge you to hear me out, because I personally use the services I’m talking about
and I’m being as unbiased as I can in my recommendations,
but I don’t expect you to take my word for it.
I don’t want to mislead you. I do receive a commission and that’s part of how I pay my bills.
But I value your trust more than that commission, so my goal here is to educate you
and I’m going to put both direct links and affiliate links in the description of this video.
You’re welcome to use whichever you want.
[intro]
Welcome to All Things Secured, my name is Josh and as you can tell,
instead of telling you to buy a VPN, I prefer to give you the information you need to make your own
informed decision. This includes controversial information that I’ll cover toward the end of
this video, so before you bash me in the comments, watch all the way through, ok?
When it comes to virtual private networks, or VPNs, there are four specific use cases where
it makes sense to use one. Let’s take a moment to walk through each of these
individually and explain why I recommend different VPNs for different use cases.
First is censorship: I used a VPN for many years to evade internet censorship by the government
in China and there are a growing number of countries that are doing the same thing.
You see, the biggest problem you face when using a VPN to evade censorship is what I call the
cat-and-mouse issue. Most of these countries where internet censorship is an issue
constantly block known IP addresses from VPN servers, making it challenging to find a good
connection. Now I’ve tried everything from proxies to Shadowsocks, but for the average person,
it’s worthwhile to invest in a VPN that is big enough to constantly change these IP addresses
and play that game of cat-and-mouse that’s required to stay ahead of the censorship.
There are a number of VPN companies that fall under this category,
but I’ve always used ExpressVPN since it was the most consistent for me
in China and it’s the easiest to setup and use for the average user.
The second reason to use a VPN is content streaming. I’m talking about movies, TV shows,
live TV, etc. VPNs open up a lot of valuable streaming options for those who live abroad
or who want to access content from other countries. For the longest time, Disney+ was not
available for me in Thailand, and the only way I was able to access the platform was through a VPN.
The important things to consider for steaming are
speed, server location and available apps. In other words, I’ve found that I need a
fast service with enough locations to cover the countries I might want to stream from,
as well as easy-to-install apps for each of my devices. ExpressVPN still works in this scenario,
but personally I’ve found Surfshark to be a better option here. The fact is that a lot of
VPN services claim to have servers in x number of countries, but the reality is that they are
virtual servers pretending to be in that country, not servers physically located there.
Now Surfshark does use virtual servers, but unlike other VPNs, they mark these options with a “V”
in their software like you see here in the case of Chile or Costa Rica. In my experience,
most streaming services get confused with these virtual servers and don’t let me stream,
so it’s helpful to be able to avoid these servers, and Surfshark lets me do that easily.
The third reason to use a VPN is to hide or change your IP address. This isn’t really a privacy thing
as much as it is just protection. It’s popular among online gamers to use a VPN to protect from
DDoS attacks. This kind of attack isn’t as common as most people portray it to be,
but it is possible. You also might need to overcome an IP ban, where a specific
service or website has blocked access because of your IP address.
The thing is, every single VPN changes your IP address. It’s a fundamental feature of
the technology. In other words, for this use case it really does not matter which VPN you
choose. Get the cheapest one, or the one that convinces you that they’re the fastest. I don’t
care. It doesn’t really matter. Any VPN you choose will hide or change your IP address.
Finally, I want to address the elephant in the room when it comes to VPNs:
privacy. Time and again I hear people talk about how VPNs are a great way to protect against man in
the middle attacks, basically shielding you while you’re on public WiFi at a coffee shop or airport.
What they don’t tell you is just how rare these kinds of attacks are. Seriously, when was the last
time you heard about one of these attacks in the news? And I know what some of you are thinking:
“It’s still better to use VPN encryption in these cases than not”. But is it really?
First, a VPN doesn’t provide any stronger encryption than what you already get with
an https-encrypted website connection. And nowadays, pretty much every website you visit is
https encrypted. What I mean is this: when you connect to a website that has https in the URL,
even if you’re on a public WiFi network, nobody can see what you’re doing. The data is encrypted,
at least with the same “military grade encryption” that you get with a VPN.
Also, as much as I like and use Surfshark and ExpressVPN in the use cases mentioned earlier,
they are still a centralized entity that don’t deserve implicit trust. They have vulnerabilities
just like any other company and they could get hacked as well. Repeating what I said before,
I don’t see why everybody is so gung-ho about trusting these VPN companies over their ISP
or public WiFi network. I use VPNs when it doesn’t involve my sensitive information.
For everything else where privacy is a priority, I prefer alternatives.
Now I’ve already done a video about VPN alternatives that you should watch after this,
but my favorite in this category is a dVPN known as Mysterium. dVPN stands for “decentralized
VPN” and it harnesses the power of a peer-to-peer network, basically using servers not controlled by
one single company, to power the VPN. While this doesn’t eliminate all risk, it does minimize it.
The benefits of something like Mysterium is that it’s usually a lot cheaper than the traditional
VPN, but if you want something free, I think using Tor is still safer than a VPN in terms of
information privacy. Basically, I prefer anything that isn’t centralized over something that is.
Ok, I’ll leave both direct links and affiliate links to each of
these services in the description and you can decide which you want to use.
If you’re intrigued by these VPN alternatives, though, you should watch
this video next, where I walk through four of my favorites. Click here to watch next.