Changing the Conversation Around VPNs

To put it mildly, commercial virtual private networks (VPNs) do not have the best reputation. For the most part, this has been their own doing.

For decades, VPN companies have largely overpromised what their services actually do. They’ve made claims of privacy and security that exceed what they are actually capable of. Though useful in some limited circumstances, many companies made VPNs seem like a panacea of security and privacy, which they are definitely not.

This hasn’t been helped by the widespread use of VPN affiliate links, which have made it difficult to obtain accurate 3rd-party information about the effectiveness of VPNs or which services are the best to use.

That said, those who did find VPNs legitimately useful were often those engaging in dubious behavior. Whether they were circumventing georestrictions on streaming services, masking their pirate activity or engaging in full-on criminal behavior, VPNs were (and maybe still are) primarily a tool for the web’s underbelly, a fact that should make us all more cautious about their use.

However, the internet is changing, and legitimate users are increasingly being caught in the middle. With few tools to fight back, VPNs are experiencing a resurgence, offering a sense of control and security in an evolving digital landscape.

While that doesn’t mean VPNs are right for everyone, or even most people, it means the conversation around them is shifting. As digital citizens, we need to actively participate in this reexamination of what they are and why they are used.

Understanding VPNs

Anti-Disclosure: This article will not have any affiliate links or VPN sponsorships. Instead, I will name the companies that attempt to buy a sponsorship on this article, if any do. My hope is that this notice will deter them from trying.

In January 2015, during another peak of conversation around VPNs, I wrote an article explaining what VPNs are and how they work.

However, the idea is relatively straightforward. A VPN lets you establish a direct, encrypted connection with another server. You then access the internet through that other server, which can be located almost anywhere in the world.

As such, using a VPN can have many benefits. It means your connection appears to be from another location, your internet service provider can’t see your traffic, and the same applies to anyone else between your device and VPN, such as a questionable Wi-Fi point.

However, there are also significant drawbacks and dangers. VPNs can slow your connection, result in many sites or services blocking you, and create a false sense of security. Additionally, many VPN services, particularly those that are free, may have their own security and privacy issues. Those issues have only gotten worse since I did my 60-day trial in June 2017.

For most people, this has limited the functionality of VPNs. They are potent tools for those in countries where internet censorship is rampant. They also add an extra layer of security for those on dubious Wi-Fi connections or fearing snooping by their ISP.

Companies have numerous ways to track you, regardless of your IP address. HTTPS already provides solid security for most data that’s transferred between your device and a website (though it still exposes the domain name and IP address), and DNS over HTTPS can take it even farther.

In short, unless you have a very specific use case, VPNs haven’t been worth the cost and hassle. Sadly, many of those use cases involved piracy or other unlawful or dubious behavior, which is a big part of why VPNs have such a terrible reputation.

However, that may be changing.

A Changing Internet

In October 2023, the United Kingdom passed the Online Safety Bill, which was subsequently enacted as the Online Safety Act. The act is a bundle of laws, but most relevant here, it requires sites to ensure that minors cannot access adult content. The list includes social media sites, messaging services and online forums that are not dedicated to pornography.

The law offered multiple ways to verify someone’s age, including facial age estimation, photo IDs and credit card checks. However, nearly all methods raised serious privacy concerns.

Since the law took effect in July 2025, those concerns have already begun to bear fruit. Earlier this week, it was announced that a third-party service Discord used to verify UK users was breached, possibly leaking government IDs.

Those Discord users would have been more secure if they’d just used a VPN to bypass the check rather than submit their ID and comply with the law.

But it’s not just the United States. As of this writing, 25 states in the United States have passed laws requiring age verification to view pornographic material. In most cases, any site that contains more than one-third pornographic content is required to comply with the law.

While these laws are well-intended, they won’t be particularly effective and may create new problems in terms of security and privacy. As the Discord story shows, these laws create caches of private information that are tempting targets for hackers.

Other methods create their own issues. As we saw with the Tea App, which required a selfie to verify the user was a woman, those images can also be leaked.

While a VPN would not help in this case, it highlights the dangers of these kinds of verification.

For many users, the solution is a VPN, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to say that’s the wrong answer.

Digital Citizenship

I was inspired to write this article after watching a recent video by Hank Green, in which he discusses online ghost towns and how many of the “places” we once loved on the internet have since disappeared.

His point is remarkably prescient, but it also raises another question. Where is someone from on the internet?

Theoretically, you’re from whatever country, state, county/parish and city you are physically in. But that’s not always the case, not even legally. Kim Dotcom is a New Zealander facing extradition to the United States because the servers he used to run his file hosting service were based in the country.

If you are “from” where your connection is, that’s easy to change. You might not be able to emigrate to another country easily, but you can be a digital citizen of that country with the click of a mouse.

Previously, this hasn’t been an important question. Very few countries had severe internet restrictions, and even fewer people were like Kim Dotcom, operating complex online services that raised legal issues. Outside the Great Firewall of China, most people didn’t have to think much about their digital citizenship.

However, we are now seeing an increase in internet restrictions in countries such as the UK and the US. Even as I write this, the US is considering a bill that would, functionally, ban all pornography that lacks “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

Governments around the world are becoming increasingly comfortable with censoring the internet. In addition to raising questions about censorship, these laws create security issues.

Our digital citizenship is a question we can no longer ignore, and, for better or worse, VPNs are a tool that can help us control it.

Bottom Line

For me, this issue first arose in early 2023. My home state of Louisiana became the first in the country to pass its age verification law. While working on a case dealing with non-consensual pornography, I hit such an age gate.

As I discussed in 2017, I’ve used VPNs as part of my work for over a decade. But it was always something I enabled for a specific purpose, not the default setting. I enabled the VPN here and was able to resume work.

But the moment stuck with me. I decided to do another VPN experiment and moved my connection to Atlanta, Georgia. When that state passed a similar law in April 2024, I moved my connection to Chicago, Illinois.

I don’t do this for privacy or security. I have no delusions that a VPN is a magic bullet to protect my anonymity or my online security. I do it as an act of protest and in an effort to be conscious about my digital citizenship.

While I support the idea of keeping content meant for adults out of the hands of children, these laws will not be effective at achieving that goal. More to the point, they create risks and hassles for legitimate users and could open the floodgates to other censorship down the line.

And that is the issue when it comes to VPNs. VPNs didn’t change. The internet did. VPNs are every bit as limited as they were 10-15 years ago. The internet, or specifically the governance of the internet, just made them more important.

So, I no longer use VPN as a dirty word. I still have many concerns about the way VPNs have been promoted and sold, but there is no denying that they are experiencing a moment right now.