It’s Time to Stop Paying for a VPN (Published 2021)
www.nytimes.comMany virtual private network services that were meant to protect your web browsing can no longer be trusted. Here are other ways.
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VPNs still have some practical uses. In terms of privacy, they can help disconnect your IP from your geographic location. Without a VPN every host you connect to can approximate your location down to a few miles.
They are also useful for bypassing country filters or to appear as if you are in another country.
Finally, if it’s your own VPN server, you can use it to access devices on your LAN even when you are far away, negating the need to have a bunch of sensitive servers exposed to the internet. That is actually the original purpose of a VPN.
I just tried a few geo-IP lookups of my current IP address, and they all point to a location that (as the bird flies) is almost exactly 100 miles from my actual location. This is despite the ISP I’m using being headquartered in my current city, but maybe they have some infrastructure there?
On mobile data I instead get a location 90 miles away, and if I look up the IP address of another machine I know the exact location of, the result is 60 miles off.
60-100 miles is a pretty generous definition of “a few”.
I think it depends. For my parents place, it literally points at the culdesac that their house is in. For my place, which is located in a relatively new community, it’s about 35 miles out.
You are lucky, for many people it’s a lot closer.