Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there?
It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity.
From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd.
Isn't Tor as safe as it can get when surfing the web?
VPNs are for when you want to obfuscate your traffic from your ISP, not the government. By passing your traffic through a private company _somewhere else_ to another private entity that has some vested interest in not reselling your data, you can prevent it from being easily mapped back to you.
Also VPN is generally much faster and higher bandwidth than TOR.
From my understanding, they have different purposes. VPNs aren’t really about safety or anonymity, Tor is the way to go for those. VPNs are for if you don’t want your ISP specifically to see your traffic for some reason, or if you want your traffic to appear like it’s coming from a different geographical location with minimal latency hit.
Edit: I should say, VPNs as a technology have far more applications than this, e.g. for accessing a secure intranet, but these are just the reasons you’d theoretically want to use a VPN service like Nord/Mullvad/etc.
It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity.
From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd.
Isn't Tor as safe as it can get when surfing the web?