Tom Scott
9 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2019–2026
7:26 · 5.9M views · Oct 28, 2019
Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.
The standard link when VPN marketing comes up, as a clear debunking of the scare tactics behind VPN ads.
20 comments from Hacker News
I feel like if someone is hawking wares on their channel they should at least use it/have faith in it/do their research. Tom Scott has a great video about VPN sponsorship and how he turned down a sponsorship from a VPN company because of the copy they wanted him to say and debunks the ads: this video Mad respect for him, and if he ever suggest a paid product in the future i'd trust him. Conversely i really dislike when they clearly don't use the product, or are shilling a product that i KNOW is bad - looking at you raycons. I can't help but lose respect and definitely distrust every sponsorship they have. tl;dr integrity matters, raycons are really not that great, and i'm tired of hearing the same copy over and over: [LINK]
> Some pour thousands of dollars into forcing influencers to say they care about security, Tangential to this, it always irks me how they talk about how they all act as if the majority of the websites their users are going to aren't HTTPS and they act like their main benefits are filling in the gaps that HTTPS actually fills in. HTTPS isn't a cure all by any means but most of the scare tactics that the big VPN companies that advertise via YouTube act like anyone will rip you credit card because you happened to be on Amazon while you were at the coffee shop. Tom Scott is the only person I've ever seen have a great video about this [0] [0] this video
Unfortunately as GP has mentioned, advertising around these typical VPN companies (Nord, Proton, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and many more) tends to be very misleading. Tom Scott put out a good video[1] that tries to debunk various marketing claims. Sure there are use cases like getting around georestrictions, and like you mentioned you can use it to get around tracking. Except that for privacy and evading tracking you need more than just a VPN, you need to be doing things like adblocking, tracker blocking, clearing all of your cookies, not signing in to anything because then the service gets to link your new VPN IP with you again. VPN ads that sell "privacy" is snake oil unless it is paired with a guide on the additional things you should be doing. [1]: this video
The thing about nordVPN (and VPN services in general) is they always talk about how funneling all your traffic through them makes it more secure and it means that governments cant spy on you and whatever. But sending all your traffic through a single point of failure seems like a bad idea from a government protection view, and how is it any more secure than https? The only thing that I've seen it be good for is making it look like you're from somewhere else to watch different stuff on streaming services. I think Tom Scott put it well here this video
... and a lot of those VPN companies are probably VC-funded. Tom Scott made a good video on the uses and non-uses of VPNs [1]. VPN advertising has changed since that video to downplay "security", but what I think is odd is that they've replaced that with advertisement that basically is "violate the terms of service of Netflix". [1] this video