I would like some privacy advice.

First and foremost, I am not selling anything, but I am looking at several commercial VPNs. So although I will link them in, they are stripped down to remove any sort of referral junk. If you link anything in, please do *NOT* use referrals in any way. If you suggest a competing product/service and want to get a referral, please PM me directly to do so. If your offered suggestion looks good I will gladly use the referral.

I am getting more and more irritated as the years go on, by snooping scum that are everywhere on the Internet. Recently some services/products have become available, and in-fact cheap to use. Enough so that I am actually considering it.

What I would like to hear is primarily why I should *NOT* do this. I know that if I cannot have a static-IP from a VPN then I will have difficulty maintaining logins all over the place. This I can live with, so long as it is not changing my IP every few minutes or something.

I already know many of the advantages that are claimed, but I would love to hear what they are not telling me and what is outright deception. Are there areas in the world where it would be technically illegal to use a VPN to utilize a service? I am sure there are. But how likely is it that anyone I am in contact with for normal day-to-day operations would even notice, and if they notice, what reason would they care so long as I am not seeking to be disruptive or do stupid things?

I love the idea of Tor. But Tor is unacceptable to me for the same reason I2P and Freenet is. Tor is more tolerable since they *DO* provide access to the real Internet instead of just a layer exclusive to those services, but it still has those layers and they are the whole reason I do not use those services.

For the record, Tor, Freenet, and I2P are used to facilitate illegal activities that I do not approve of, nor have any desire to support. I believe in freedom of speech, but my definition of speech does not include piracy and illicit porn that shall not be named here. Please do not add to this part in any way. Lest the thread be closed.

Also, can anyone tell me first-hand some useful details about OpenVPN, L2TP, and PPTP protocols? I have a good Linksys WRT54GL router and I know at least a few of these protocals can be used via the router itself with OpenWRT/Tomato or another custom firmware.

A VPN would potentially be beneficial for a number of reasons. A big reason is that I can pick a location near a service that usually restricts access based upon the users IP address location. For example, some images linked in recently by Kazeto and some videos linked into the music video thread were not available to me in America, but I could have tried a few other IPs in other locations to see if it was available there.

But rather than regurgitate the same details, read for yourself if you do not already know the claims these commercial services offer.

Here is one that is offering me a pretty good deal.
http://www.ipvanish.com/

It would cost me 60-80 USD per year for this option. And that I think I can manage if I can justify it. Half the reason for this thread is that I want to talk myself out of it as a wasted resource.

Thank you each for any replies. If you feel you may violate any rule by discussing this, please send me a PM rather than risk posting whatever you would have said here. (The rules are loose and usually not used to beat you down with. But there are things that can come up that would result in this thread being deleted instantly.)

 

That link is quite helpful. I already found a comparable service for half the price of the one I was looking at above. I used this link from that article you posted above to find it. I am still looking though. So who knows, I may manage even better results.
https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/

And here is the current best price, and fully featured VPN I have found. $40 USD per year, and basically identical to the one I linked in the above post I made. Oh, one major benefit to this one too, they accept Bitcoins as payment. (Bitcoins are supposed to be the digital equivalent of cash currency, and as such it can be argued that it is illegal to require logging and disclosures of expenses made using them unless all currencies require logging and receipts in your local by law. But that tangent is for another thread.)
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/

 

I'm also tempted to get a VPN, but I'm unsure how PIA can offer the services they do at that price, when most competitors start at 60$...
I'm also unable to find their policy on logging IP data which would be the most important thing to me. If I get a VPN I want one that does not log any IP at all.

 

There are only a few that log nothing. The majority log only what IP you connect to and at what times. They make it impossible to entirely rely upon correlating this with other records by means of giving some access to the same IPs to other users all the time.

Here is a quote:
Private Internet Access

Response to Q1: “We absolutely do not maintain any VPN logs of any kind. We utilize shared IP addresses rather than dynamic or static IPs, so it is not possible to match a user to an external IP. These are some of the many solutions we have implemented to enable the strongest levels of anonymity amongst VPN services. Further, we would like to encourage our users to use an anonymous e-mail and pay with Bitcoins to ensure even higher levels of anonymity should it be required. Our core verticals are privacy, quality of service, and prompt customer support.”

Response to Q2: “Our company currently operates out of the United States with gigabit gateways in the US, Canada, UK, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. We chose the US, since it is one of the only countries without a mandatory data retention law. We will not share any information with third parties without a valid court order. With that said, it is impossible to match a user to any activity on our system since we utilize shared IPs and maintain absolutely no logs.”

That says to me that they utilize a service very similar to Tor, except it is more legitimate, and less of a trap for honest people to be associated with outright monsters.

 

I use purevpn, but i didn't do a lot of research beforehand, i'm just using it to get through the Chinese Firewall, and I needed one fast ... I wouldn't recommend it though.

 

Sorry to necro this, but I just bought a subscription to PIA. It works wonders. No speed degradation is notable. I should point out however that OpenVPN by itself does not work on my system. The PIA client that uses OpenVPN works fine though. But I have no idea how to set it to use Blowfish or AES instead of that gawdawful MSCHAP-V2 junk that I think it defaults to.

I may give up on the Windows clients altogether and use Tomato/DD-WRT on my router to make it truly universal. But I fear that the good algorithms are probably too much for my old WRT54GL to handle. That would also leave me unable to use many parts of the Internet that are blocking VPNs. But it would be offset by routing my VOIP phone through the VPN too.

Difficult choices...

Anyone have any advice about OpenVPN? It installs fine, but the default will make no attempt to access, much less protect the network. When I tried installing the OpenVPN GUI client from the OpenVPN site, I could get it to work, but even after editing the configuration manually I never once found a way to set the desired encryption protocol.