I am retired and have only one desktop I use at home. Is it worth it to purchase a VPN service? My internet provider is Comcast and I rent the modem from them.
Thanks
I subscribe to PIA (Private Internet Access) and also have Comcast as my internet provider but bought my own modem. Well worth the minimal cost!
I tried that and for me it caused trouble with most commercial sites and all banking sites. I believe it is because the business sites saw me coming in from a non-personal server. And hackers use the non-personal servers in their hack attacks. So some of the sites would not let me on at all. The ones that did had obnoxious levels of multiple pages of the 'prove you are not a robot' photos of cars, bridges, etc. Considering that the router has it's own security it really turned out to be unnecessary from my home.
I do use the VPN on my cell and laptop when travelling and using stranger routers and modems.
I don't use a VPN service because I keep detecting "lag" that slows down my connection.... and I rent the modem from them.
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However, I recommend you buy your own modem*. You are probably paying at least $10 a month. You can get a good modem for less than $100. So, it will pay for itself within a year. (I am still using my Motorola modem from 5 years ago and haven't paid Comcast a dime to rent one.)
* Your cable company's website should have a list of "compatible" modems.
I hear VPN's being advertised on radio more frequently over the past 6-12 months but IMO their benefits are way oversold and the average person does not need one, especially when at home and connected on a known network.
If someone travels frequently or connects to less trusted networks then it can provide some benefit. For example if you are sitting in the coffee shop using your device on their Wifi network; they can capture a log to know that you accessed (for example) bank-of-america, facebook, early-retirement.org, etc. but even then still not know your account name or passwords. If you were connecting to websites without encryption then more issues would come into play.
A secondary question is do you trust the VPN provider. I LoL'd when facebook first offered a free VPN service and encouraged people to use it. IMO it was clearly an effort to see every website a person visited in order to better serve up advertisements to them later,....even though they said it was primarily for users in countries with oppressive governments, to allow the user to hide their traffic from their government.