If so I'd like to know why. ............. Please enlighten me.

February 19, 2024 8 min read

In a world where the line between reality and the digital realm is blurred, there’s a growing need for tools that help us navigate the online domain and protect us from its potential pitfalls. VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), which establish a secure connection between the user’s device and the server hosting a particular website, are one such tool. Over the years, as we have begun to spend more and more of our time online, VPNs have become ever more popular. The VPN market is projected to grow sevenfold from $45 billion to $350 billion by 2023. An impressive number in itself, it also reflects the growing awareness and interest in online privacy.

But privacy is not the only reason people turn to VPNs. In fact, people use VPNs for a variety of reasons, from circumventing censorship to getting airline tickets on the cheap. They also use VPNs differently: some choose to enable a VPN for all sites, while others only enable it for a few selected sites — Netflix, for example.

To get a better understanding of what drives people to resort to VPNs, what features they value the most, and how they use VPNs in countries with a strikingly different Internet climate and regulations, we have conducted a survey, polling over 500 users of different VPN services. Today we’re ready to present our findings, which we hope will give insight not only into VPN usage patterns but also into the overall attitudes to privacy.

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Steve your second example is the sort of illegal use that I mentioned.

It isn't illegal in all cases. Someone traveling would be able to use a VPN to stream from their home country while in another location.

Good point Steve but I wonder how often that would matter. For instance we both have Paramount Plus which requires a log in. If we were in a different country and logged into the service I wonder if we would be blocked. I really don't know. The same question would apply to any other such service such as Prime or Netflix. Even my cable supplier streams everything. Would I be able to log in and view? Again I don't know.

When i was in the US & Canada Netflix presumably picked up the IP address from the WIFI connection i was connected to and defaulted to US/Canada content meaning i had to load the VPN and change to a UK server to get Netflix UK content.
Prime was a bit odd, i could switch from US/Canada to UK but i was never able to download anything to my tablet for the flight home due to location restrictions being implemented... which was really annoying and i never was able to work out why.
I have satelitte TV (Sky) and they also have a website where i can stream live TV from within the UK they somehow were always able to recognise i was using a VPN so blocked me meaning i was unable to access that website at all while in North America.

It was all a bit hit and miss for what i could access using a VPN, but it was better than not having one.

That was about 6 years ago so maybe the technology has changed since, unless you want to pay for my flights i'll have no way of finding out any time soon!

........unless you want to pay for my flights i'll have no way of finding out any time soon!

Hey!!! Mayhaps we can develop some VPN money! In this case VPN stands for Very Profitable Notion.