Australier blockeras från porr – nedladdning av VPN-tjänster rusar

A virtual private network (VPN) service is a proxy server marketed to help users bypass Internet censorship such as geo-blocking and users who want to protect their communications against user profiling or MitM attacks on hostile networks. A wide variety of entities provide VPN services for several purposes. Depending on the provider and the application, they do not always create a true private network. Instead, many providers simply provide an Internet proxy that uses VPN technologies such as OpenVPN or WireGuard. Commercial VPN services are often used by those wishing to disguise or obfuscate their physical location or IP address, typically as a means to evade Internet censorship or geo-blocking. Providers often market VPN services as privacy-enhancing, citing security features, such as encryption, from the underlying VPN technology. However, when the transmitted content is not encrypted before entering the proxy, that content is visible at the receiving endpoint regardless of whether the VPN tunnel itself is encrypted for the inter-node transport. On the client side, configurations intended to use VPN services as proxies are not conventional VPN configurations. However, they do typically utilize the operating system's VPN interfaces to capture the user's data to send to the proxy. This includes virtual network adapters on computer OSes and specialized "VPN" interfaces on mobile operating systems. A less common alternative is to provide a SOCKS proxy interface. In 2025, 1.75 billion people used VPNs. By 2027, this market has been projected to grow to $76 billion. As of 2022, recommendation websites for VPNs tended to be affiliated with or even owned by VPN service providers, and VPN service providers often make misleading claims on their products.