Comcast has no vested interest in not sharing/re-selling my data. also it provides a stable IPv4 with geoip tagging that both serves to de-anonymize me and make it easier for third-parties to track me.
My VPN provider has a vested interest in not sharing or re-selling my data, if caught doing so it would cause a major loss of business for them and potentially permanently tarnish their reputation. Additionally they provide a stable IPv4 shared with many other users. Tracking is still possible, but is far less trivial and not so easily correlated with a county/state.
So I use a VPN. It keeps me safe from script-kiddies who might discover my IP when I visit their website. I provide free help for people having trouble with HTML/CSS, so I visit a lot of strange places.
Comcast and $VPN_PROVIDER have a vested interest in staying in business, so they will gladly hand over the data to the friendly neighbourhood intelligence agency when requested.
Agree, personally though $agency isn’t part of my threat model while my ISP most certainly is. I would even pay a premium if they offered similar privacy controls as a VPN, but they’d be publicly admitting to shenanigans that most of their customers are blissfully ignorant of!
I've had an ISP literally send me a piece of mail telling me they were going to monetize my browsing data. The VPN at least claims it's trying to protect my privacy.
The most common use case is when you don't trust your local network connection. In some places, ISPs collect and sell browsing data. In many places, public wifi hotspots do too. Whether or not one or the other is more trustworthy is a personal judgement call.
There's few use cases outside of placebo. Torrenting without your ISP yelling at you, for one. Getting access to region-locked content, for another. Maybe regional pricing?
You're right that at the end of the day, it's just someone else seeing where you visit. And frankly, I think VPN users would be a higher target of surveillance anyways.
And if the VPN's company is from any 5-9-13-whatever-eyes country, you can assume all that information is being collected by them anyways.
One use-case you didn't mention is when the user doesn't want ShadyISP to sell their browsing habits (which are conveniently linked to a billing address, name, and more), despite the user understanding that governments could still potentially have access.
>You're right that at the end of the day, it's just someone else seeing where you visit
You write this as if it's some trivial little detail. Who that someone is that is privy to your browsing habits is a significant detail.
Everyone with an internet connection should at least read the Key Findings, just the first few pages of that report.
I assume that regional or small ISPs have similar practices, but these big ones have been M&A’d into massive orgs having control of “a much larger and broader cache of consumer data than ever before, without having to explain fully their purposes for such collection and use, much less whether such collection and use is good for consumers.”
That's fair. Governments may get it either way, but I doubt they bother to sell the data - and a paid-for VPN obviously wouldn't want to sell it, assuming they're worried about getting caught and losing customers.
I mean, I trust Mullvad not to sell my internet traffic to 25 of the highest bidders, or hand it over to whatever three letter agency wants it because I say something that's a bit to unamerican.
And I get to circumvent the prying eyes of my ISP, office's BYOD network, etc.
To hide the IPs of the servers you are visiting from your internet provider?
With a VPN, the VPN provider sees those IPs. How is that better?
And why would I care that my internet provider sees those IPs in the first place?