The people saying that are either idiots or private tracker snobs. VPNs are absolutely an important part of shielding yourself from any potential legal action, particularly if you are torrenting.

It's true that a VPN doesn't make you or your activity completely anonymous - you are trusting the logging policy of your provider - and won't necessarily protect you against a court order, for example. However the only realistic danger to a small scale pirate such as yourself is the copyright troll who traces torrent IP addresses back to your ISP, thereby identifying you. If you mask your IP address with a VPN, you prevent them from doing this efficiently and effectively protect yourself from the threat of legal action.

The thing with VPN's is that you're only shifting the trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. That provider can still see pretty much everything you're doing and your real IP, if they wanted to. To add to this, plenty of VPN companies have been found logging when they said they didn't. I would say either set up traffic for I2P, or simply go with an actually no logs VPN company like Mullvad, who's been battle tested and doesn't log, and you'll be fine.

People also say that because it's important to understand what a VPN is and does as well. It wasn't originally meant to be any sort of anonymity tool, the technology exists to make it seem as if your traffic is coming from somewhere else - which allows for things like remote work on a local network.

Almost every time "regular" people get in trouble for piracy, the reason is that they seeded something, a copyright law firm (or their contractor) noticed it, noted their IP address and then either went and got the real life address from the ISP so that they could send you "the bill" or they made the ISP send you something, depending on where you live really.

That means, as long as that that IP address that shows up on that law firms screen isn´t actually "your own", isn´t immediately traceable to you simply by calling up your ISP, you´re already one step ahead in the game.

That law firm might still try to contact the owner of that IP though, either to send them "a bill" or to get them to rat on you. And that´s why it is important that your VPN provider operates in a way that allows them to simply ignore that. Either by operating out of a country that doesn´t mandate them to "help finding you" or by simply not keeping any logs of what actual IP was connected to what VPN IP at what time.

So if you have a VPN provider that maybe operates out or through a country where piracy is legal or has proven through audits that they couldn´t rat even if they wanted, you´re highly unlikely to get into any trouble.

Using a VPN and HOW you use it all depends on your operational security (OPSEC).

If you're a pirate consumer, then basically you need to keep your ISP from knowing what you're doing, to prevent copyright strikes or shit-letters from Disney etm. A good VPN is fine.

If you're a torrent creator, you need to raise your security a bit, depending on the "hotness" of the content. Rare anime torrent? Eh who cares. But you're hosting HDCams from a movie released yesterday, or games that will be released officially in a week? You need to use a VPN in a country that does not have good relations to your country of origin. Yes, that means if you're in the USA, get a Russian or Chinese VPN.

If you're leaking state secrets, Snowden talked about what he did. He cracked wifi within a 2h drive distance, used a 12dBi yagi antenna, with a burner laptop loaded with Tails (Tor linux distro), and only used 1 cracked wifi per use. Never went back to the same place. Then again, he didn't exactly fare well eventually.

A VPN doesn't make you anonymous, it enhances your privacy. If you login to a named FB account you're still you. All you've done is tell FB you're using a VPN.

In terms of torrenting, a VPN client, if configured correctly, encrypts all data between the device its on and the endpoint. This means your ISP cannot spy on what you're doing. When you leech or seed it also masks your real IP.

But you have to trust your VPN provider isn't logging you. And if you use a provider who's located in a good country (legally speaking) but they own or rent servers in not so good countries (5 eyes etc) and you connect via those servers then the provider has no physical access to them. Tracking could easily be carried out without their or your knowledge.

If you pay a provider with a card or PayPal then there's a paper trail to you. Use a VPN that accepts Monero or cash physically mailed to them.

Make sure your VPN network interface is bound to your torrent client so if your connection drops, your IP isn't exposed.

There's often a lot of bad information about VPNs which is never backed up with any actaul evidence.

Sure, you have to make sure its working properly and bound to your torrent client, but if it is, then that's enough to protect you from copyright claims.

There is no evidence of any commerical VPN provider ever responding to a copyright notice. People mistakenly think this, when all that's really happened is they were not connected properly and their ISP got the notice direct. There is no situation where the copyright troll contacts the VPN provider, find the real user, then somehow makes the ISP send a notice to them. Doesn't even make sense.

VPNs protect your IP address, which is useful, but it ends there. Your IP is known to your VPN provider and can even still be found by those tech-savvy enough if you don't take the right precautions. Basically, VPNs are useful, but don't expect them to be the ultimate privacy multi-tool. It's more like one of many different tools to protect yourself online

It depends what are you doing. Torrenting child porn? A VPN won't change anything because they'll hopefully collaborate with law enforcement to track you down.

Torrenting a tv show? Usually the vpn company will ignore any requests from law enforcement as it's not a real crime

VPN is good as long as you use it correctly. I've seen people use vpn and still loging into there email or bank or do shopping while on same vpn that they use for piracy. Number one rule when using vpn is to never mix your real life accounts with the onces you use with vpn.

That sentiment isn't so much about piracy, but general security. Do keep in mind that the NSA can easily sniff your VPN traffic, even through logless Mullvad in theory, and access your account information to correlate and deanonymize you via subpoena. This is done routinely, and there are thousands of illegal subpoenas done yearly with no repercussion. Fortunately it seems the NSA is only going after heinous criminals, but that could also change. To be truly NSA safe is nearly impossible - did you know your password can be determined by a simple audio recording of you typing it? The NSA has frequently snuck into private residence to install keyloggers as well. What will a VPN matter in such a case?

So a VPN might prevent a DCMA notice from your ISP, but if the NSA starts caring about piracy y'all are out of luck.

people that think VPNs will protect them are naive

The correct way to phrase this should be

people that think VPNs alone will protect them are naive

Yes, an VPN is not private, because you trust your VPN provider instead your internet provider. But as a german, it's pretty clear that all internet providers would give your name and adress to everyone that asks for it, regardless if you download something through torrent or stream something without the license. I would bet, in near future you cant even download a 30 years old ROM for an emulator, without getting a mail from Nintendos lawyers.

And yes, i trust Mullvad more then my internet provider. All of my devices are connected to Mullvad and i had never any problems.

Try to find a VPN that’s a nonprofit or community oriented. Usually the VPNs with the most marketing and advertising are the most profit driven and less concerned about your privacy. Use DDG, Brave search or anything but Google to research. A lot of people don’t understand that Google is just an advertising company that uses it’s search engine sell products, they also get commission through referral, so it’s in the company’s interest for you to pay more.

I think the big issue with commercial VPN's are that you are trusting your traffic through someone else's infrastructure where they're typically a target for malicious actors.

If you want to be relatively sure of your privacy, use something like a cloud vm from for example digitalocean and install wireguard on it using https://pivpn.io

I have a home vpn where I connect to my home lan using the wireguard vpn app on my phone. Which means I get more privacy since mobile providers often slurp up dns queries to sell to advertisers and also it allows me to use my pihole for adblocking on my phone.

I use a VPN to avoid captivation portals. That alone makes it worth it for me since I can have free internet connection, my ISP just puts a captivation portal instead of just cutting off your internet access.

Here you go, this is the truth.

I think this is not how it works. It's like saying: I'll connect a physical lock to my laptop and I'm more secure. (Many PC laptops have on the side a standardized connector for physical locks which is often used in electronics stores)

Better to go a step back and to consider your Threat Model. What are you doing? What are things that could likely happen right now? Is adding to your security/backing up your Threat Model or is it making things worse because it's adding stuff that you don't need, making workflows so complicated you're likely to misconfigure?

To give a more practical example, there have been a lot of conspiracy theories about Antivirus software. In some sense the nay sayers are right and it actually adds possible holes since they tend to run with elevated privileges. On the other hand, does it really matter for your use case? If you download random stuff online, you should probably install one. (Probably also for your fellow humans so your computer doesn't end up being a botnet host) But if everything on your computer is hand-picked (TM), you might be actually right and they decrease security.