VPNs are great for use in public coffee shops when you need to use services that are not otherwise sufficiently encrypted and/or you simply want to avoid eavesdroppers, but please bear in mind that they do not provide anonymity. You should "simply, assume" that the service provider is maintaining connection logs, which are subject to subpoena. Your tunneled traffic will emerge onto "the Internet at large" from banks of IP-addresses that are well known to be "a VPN outlet."

Yes, they are a very useful service in that they provide a very strong wrapper of cryptographic security around traffic which might otherwise not have sufficient protection. "Anyone else in the same coffee shop is by definition 'on the same subnet,'" but they cannot eavesdrop on what you are doing. (Of course, you should be running a firewall to prevent them from trying to otherwise connect to your computer.)

I use mine pretty much full time. The only thing i don't use it for is when I do anything that involves banking or paying for things. i do use it on my phone as an always on service. Just to add an extra layer when im on public wifi.

If you do use one its essentially only adding an extra hop to your connection and as sundialsvcs mentions, doesn't grant true anonymity. But it does blur your identity a little. It also depends where you decide your exit point will be. If you use the same country as the one you live in, it would be fairly straightforward for a governemnt agency to identify you, so don't. Set an exit point somewhere else in the world and if double hop vpns or vpn-tor bridges are available, use them. Nord supports both of those (and im guessing so do most of the other good vpn companies). Double hop vpns tend to be fairly quick, vpn-tor bridges not so much.

I really question the whole VPN thing.
I can only speak of the USA. Your IP sees everything that makes it to your modem. And they are allowed to
monetize this data. Just install a good browser like firefox
and use the built in VPN if you want the other servers in the world to think your somewhere else.

Its all fine if all you want to do is browse securely, and admittedly if you want full browsing anonymity why bother with a VPN when TOR is free. VPNs for me are about making it so that my ISP only sees connections to one other IP. They may know its a VPN, but thats all they will know, period.

The other thing is the US is a reasonably free country with good laws that protect its people. Not all countries are like that. Places like China, most of the Middle East and some parts of Africa are not safe places to be online. In those places having a strong cryptographic tunnel to push all your traffic through, is kind of useful and possibly lifesaving.

But like everything they have their uses. Whether someone needs one is down to that person.

I like TorGuard, It's the one for me.

This VPN is indeed not bad, but I won’t ever consider installing it. A good friend told me all the pros and cons of this VPN, and I’d rather use another one for my needs. I was lucky enough to find a good VPN, thanks to a website that had a list of the best VPN providers. I found the website randomly while I was browsing through the internet, and I decided to give it a read. It was a great decision because right after that, I chose the best option and installed it. It turned out to be the best VPN that I have ever used in my life, and if anyone is looking for a good VPN, then I would love to recommend reading the review.

VPN should not be regarded as a tool for "anonymity." Your encrypted traffic will emerge back onto the public internet from one of several public IP-addresses that are well understood to be "portals." And, you should implicitly assume that the owners of the VPN service are necessarily keeping very detailed records, to save themselves from the "crushing legal liability" which they would otherwise richly(!) deserve. If they're presented with a subpoena, they're going to be prepared to answer it.

"Public VPN" is therefore only good to protect your private communications from potential eavesdroppers within your coffee shop ... and then only for communications which do not already support encryption, such as "https" web sites. (Or most e-mail servers.)

If you are "up to no good," then "you deserve what you get," and you'll find that VPN won't help you. (And, for what it's worth, "TOR is also highly over-rated ...")

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Ask your self why do you want a VPN. If the reason is so websites are unable to track your IP then fine.
if I want websites to think i am in another location fine.
If you are trying to be anonymous never happen. Trump and his gang passed a law so your IP
can read and store all your internet and they are able to monetize it. we voted against it in IL.
take it up with your Senator.

Only way to keep your IP out of the loop is through encrypted transmissions.
No way getting around your IP. Wether it be 2 3 4 5 g. servers.

I see this everyday about VPN so great.
Well you just try to connect to the internet without a IP doing a hand shake with your UUID.
The big VPN RIP OFF.

Even the Tor browser will explain this to you.
You need to read up on it. Roger when he was at the U of I pushing this Tor server/Browser
came to my house sat down at my computer and was amazed at how fast Slackware had it up and running.

He was honest young kid to me "Young Man he was" This is about security not hiding.
Any ways the beer that night was good.

I'd say - just "leave politics completely out of it" and focus on what you need to do and why.

"VPN," just like "TOR" (although the two are entirely different, both in topology and in purpose!), is strictly a tunnel. Its only purpose is to allow the transport of communications from one place to another.

In the former case, the traffic is meant to be "unintelligible." In the latter case, "unnoticed."

If you are simply interested in "protecting yourself in a coffee shop," i.e. "from other users within your local subnet," the question by now might be moot. Notice the "https: in this website's URL ... or, today, virtually every other one. ("Thank you-u-u-u, letsencrypt.org!!") Users in your coffee shop are immediately shut-out. Even e-mail sending (outside of a "webmail" client) is almost always encrypted.

Therefore, "the first-mile problem," unlike not-so-long-ago, is by now essentially solved, without the need for any on-your-part "tunneling."

So, in "the public-server case," your two remaining "things you need to do" become either "the concealment of your IP address" (public-server VPN), or "the concealment of the very fact that you are communicating anything" (public TOR). Bearing in mind that the address-ranges from which your traffic must eventually emerge are well-known, I'll leave it up to you to evaluate the benefits.

Yes, a few years ago, the use of encryption within "the internet at large" was much less. But then, services like "letsencrypt" broke the certificate-authority monopoly, and the game has never been the same and never will be again. As you can now plainly see, "https:" has now become quite universal.

Depends what you need:
good VPN is expensive
get the one that tunnel vpn traffic in https/443 and provider is located outside the jurisdiction of your country
for good measure get the second VPN provider and chain two VPNs
or run TOR within VPN

This will work well, unless you are breaking the law of your country, then of course none of this will help. But assuming that you want anonymity, this should should be fine.

So far as I am aware, you can't use VPN and TOR at the same time, and "chaining VPNs," if you could actually find a way to do it, would be of no benefit.

If you regularly connect in a public place to business services which are not otherwise already encrypted – Microsoft Outlook®, for example, already is – then you should always use some kind of VPN service and send all of your Internet traffic through it. This will completely protect your traffic from eavesdroppers and industrial spies lurking in your coffee shop, who are most-certainly out there.

As noted, VPN acts as a "tunnel" which wraps everything that passes through it in a civilian-impenetrable wrapper of cryptographic security which – just like HTTPS – is completely invisible to its beneficiaries. (Do not assume that the military nor law enforcement cannot break it ... they undoubtedly can.)

This protection ends at the public and well-known endpoint, where the traffic will be tendered onto the Internet in its original form. Any further cryptographic protection must be provided by you.

If you intend to violate the laws of any country, I suggest that you surf to "orange jumpsuit dot com" because you will very soon need it ... and, deserve it.

It is easy to tunnel TOR in VPN:
1) your router connects to VPN, your box connects to TOR
2) your box (VM host) connects to VPN your VM client connects to TOR
3) other options too


your tunnel is visible but when you can wrap VPN is SHH or SSL for example not so much. This has some benefits.

Whether VPN is necessary or not this is up to user OP was asking about good VPNs, so there are some requirements.