I’ve always had it on, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass. Especially on worse (not necessarily slower) networks.
On laptop it’s fine for the most part since the use-case is a bit different, but on a phone it’s causing me some annoyances/issues.
With my carrier indoors it takes on average 62 seconds to connect. This is pretty annoying if toggling/switching VPN servers more often.
But when travelling (e.g.: in a train) it can make the difference from slightly spotty signal to almost never being connected successfully, impacting usability.
As such, I often find myself not even using VPN in such cases in the first place.
For comparison, plain Wireguard is done before I can pull away my finger from the “connect” button, usually even on 2G EDGE.
Do you keep this (perhaps a bit paranoid-level) option on?
Even if actually useful in the future, it would only protect traffic recorded from User to VPN anyway.
If you don’t need to use a VPN, eg. while on the move, why use one in the first place?
Personally i mostly use a VPN/tor for browsing the web, because i do not trust my ISP. There is also heavy censorship in my country, so i need to anyway. (For example, feddit.org/blahaj are blocked for… some reason. So it’s way harder to browse lemmy without one of them.)
for when you don’t trust your monopolistic ISP, and when you want to take advantage of the filtering setup at home
I’m fully fine with a selfhosted VPN, and use that myself. But commercial VPNs are not the solution to anything.
It still helps with localization on websites so that I get better results (for me).
But also, my ISP’s IPs have such awesome reputation that in certain places I get less Captchas on Mullvad. For example on Google in incognito or reset browser.
Plus it still helps privacy-wise. ISP doesn’t know what I connect to, destination doesn’t know my (ISP’s) IP.
The only thing I don’t use VPN for is, ironically, torrents. The only stuff I torrent is legal, and it’s faster this way.
Just use a search with easy language/localization setting then, you shouldn’t use google anyway, not only for privacy but also as a matter of principle. Also, funneling all traffic through a VPN just shifts the tracking to them, so they still know which account number visits what and when. While in public WiFis, mobile networks etc. It’s probably better to not use a VPN, as to spread traces over multiple seperate services. Or use multiple VPNs.
I’ll trust Mullvad over literally any ISP and/or Government. If I wasn’t willing to go even that far with trust, I’d buy half a dozen and chain them at semi-random halfhourly shifts of chains, filter over TOR between the last two and without a doubt whoever those 5 are, Mullvad would be my link to the shuffling chain from wherever I’m at.
Also, I don’t need a reason to not trust anyone to not trust anyone.