Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - The Shocking Plan to Kill Online Privacy: A VPN Ban Will Break the Web

Episode Date: October 3, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON!!!!Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 A VPN hides your IP address, making it harder for hackers, corporations and the government to track your activity. Most people know VPNs as a way to get around geogating (like if content is banned in one country you can use a VPN to get around the ban).But as authoritarian governments in places like America and the UK seek to crack down on online speech, VPNs are under attack. It's getting harder and harder to use them effectively, and recently there's even been talk of an outright ban. Lia Holland is an activist at Fight for the Future, a civil liberties group fighting to protect VPN access. She joined me to dig into the political campaign against VPNs and talk about how to fight back. PS: A lot of VPNs are owned by Israel!! Or they trap you into subscription plans. Be careful before downloading one, here's a guide from the EFF on VPNs: https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-vpn-thats-right-youFight For the Future's Defend VPNs campaign: https://www.defendvpns.com If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenzFollow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0 https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

I think as these walls go up, we're going to very rapidly see a lot of people get VPN pilled as it were because they're not going to have any other options. We've talked a lot on Free Speech Friday about the massive amount of personal data that travels across the internet and through your phone every single second. Safeguarding your privacy online is so important. So today I want to dig into the world of VPNs. A VPN or virtual private network basically works by encrypting your internet connection and masking your IP address, which makes it harder for hackers, corporations,

and even governments to track your activity online. Most people know VPNs as a way to get around geogating. So if your content is banned in one country, you can use a VPN to get around that ban and access the internet basically as if you're in another country. Unfortunately, as authoritarian governments in places like America and the UK and elsewhere seek to crack down on online speech, VPNs are under attack. It's getting harder and harder to use them effectively. And recently there's been talk of even an outright ban on VPNs. Leah Holland is an activist at Fight for the Future, a civil liberties group fighting to protect VPN access. Today we're going to dig into the political campaign against VPNs. We're going to talk about how to fight back, why you should use

them, when you should use them, and more. Hi, Leah, welcome. Hi, Taylor. I am such a fan of the pod. It's great to be here. I'm so excited to talk to you today. because I feel like we all hear about VPNs. Maybe some people that are listening have used them. When the TikTok ban went through for like six hours or whatever that was in January, I know a lot of people were sort of rushing to VPN to see if they could use it to get around the TikTok ban.

So I wanna kind of back up and explain, I guess, like what is a VPN? Like how does it work? So a VPN is essentially a secure tunnel to a different server to allow your web, traffic to appear as if it's coming from somewhere else. That's the 10,000 foot view. It basically lets you pretend like you're browsing from a different location.

So like, for example, if you're in Mississippi, you can pretend like you're browsing from New York and still be able to get on blue sky. How did this industry emerge? Because I feel like now we hear about so many different VPNs or so many different options. How did VPNs originate? VPN started when the internet started to be a place to do work. When businesses decided that they were going to store all of their records and information online, They needed a solution to allow remote workers or like workers who are traveling or even just offices in different places to all be accessing and working off of the same documents.

This is like early 2000s that we're talking. So the VPN was created more as like a corporate security solution than necessarily as a privacy or anti-censorship measure. It seems like VPNs have now become sort of popular consumer technology. Like I know so many VPN companies that advertise with YouTubers and stuff like that. When did it jump from being this like corporate security solution to this consumer tech product? The jump there really began when people were getting those like nasty grams for torrenting music and movies and things like that. Also in the 2000s where your IP address was used to identify you if you were downloading a show or an album or what have you and threaten you with legal action from like, IP holders because of the highly covered instances of trying to sue a teenager for downloading

an album that they couldn't afford because it was $17 or whatever. And then additionally at that time, people became very aware of this privacy issue and started using VPNs for more than just torrenting. So why should we care about VPNs now? Because I feel like people like, okay, VPNs, yeah, I've heard of it. I see those sometimes. I get ads for them. Who cares?

VPNs are important because we live under surveillance. capitalism and at a time when governments increasingly are wanting to censor the internet in order to take away its power both as an educational tool and also as an organizing tool. The surveillance capitalist piece comes in when you think about VPN's blocking your IP address from being shared with whoever a website wants to give it to. This is largely data brokers or really anybody who wants to pay for it. These websites are often trying to gobble up as much information as possible. And they use your IP address not only to tell people more or less exactly where you are,

but potentially also to de-anonomize other information or other browsing activity that you do, where you may not be sharing your name or other identifying information. So that IP address is actually a big lynch pen in terms of surveilling you online. And that piece that we spoke about earlier about how a VPN allows you to pretend that you're browsing from somewhere else is very important when we have. have states like Mississippi where they have passed age verification legislation that is forcing websites to go dark in those regions in order not to be sued out of existence or like with what we just saw in Nepal with the social media bans and VPN use spiking over there. This is a way to get to the internet that the government doesn't want you to have and it

is one of our last ditch tools to do so. So that's what I kind of want to get into because I feel like exactly what you just said of this is sort of this last stitch tool that people have to circumvent some of these really restrictive, like, censorship laws. I know in the UK after the Online Safety Act passed, VPN usage spiked. And since then, there's talk of, like, banning VPNs, I think, and also trying to make it so that you can't use VPNs. Like, even with the TikTok ban, when it did go into effect,

I think that you couldn't even use a VPN to circumvent it. So it seems like VPNs are under attack. Yeah, they are. Because for a lot of people, they are that last-ditch tool, either for their privacy and safety online, or for online access to knowledge and information. But a crucial thing to note to make this not a VPN ad is that VPNs are filtering your web traffic.

So instead of that website or what have you catching everything that you do online, the VPN is catching it, which makes it very, very important for the VPN that you're using to be trustworthy, which can sometimes be a really hard thing to assess. Because if it's some free VPN you found online and you just decided to install randomly, they could have your credit card info, your baking login all of the above because they are the ones that are holding those keys to

your traffic and your online life. So it's in no way a perfect system and it's not the system that we should have in order to just use the internet the way that we want to. But it is important because we live under 19th century privacy laws and in a time of great moral panic around online safety that's turning out to be a force for making the internet even less safe than it was before. Let's talk about some of these bans. Like, how can they ban VPNs if, you know, the VPN is making it seem like you're not even based where you're based? The easiest and, like, most low-hanging fruit way to ban VPNs is to ban them from the App Store for Apple. And a lot of people previously have said, okay, well, they're banned from Apple's App Store, so I'll just use an Android.

But now Google is about to require that all apps be registered with Google. So it's creating a very similar choke point for the, like, base. level ability to install or side load a VPN on your phone or like other devices. So that's like the base level way to do this. And then in a country like Indonesia, for example, I was reading about all these different ways where VPNs are largely banned that people are increasingly finding alternative means to install VPNs. And this is everything from like NGOs handing out thumb drives with VPN tech on them so that

people can install the technology to just private hand-to-hand transmission of the files that you would need to install these pieces. And when you get to that point where the government is engaging in, like, more and more sophisticated vans on VPNs, what it is really like it's a cat and mouse game between the government that is trying to identify traffic that is encrypted, that could be a VPN and the creators of the VPN who are trying to out-enovate those sensors that are looking to, like, target and shut down those operations. I know I sound like a crazy person every week ranting about it. Like, oh, my God, we're getting censorship around the world. But, like, there are these sort of, like, global trends around these censorship laws and sort of just creating, honestly, the type of internet that we've always criticized countries like China and Russia for having where it's like a completely kind of domestic version of the internet where you only can access information that's approved. You can only access approved websites. And we're kind of losing like the global nature of the web. And it feels like in a lot of ways, like VPNs are kind of the last line of defense.

in that effort to kind of maintain this globalized system? It's sad but true that we haven't gotten to a point where we understand that the tools of censorship and the hands of people that we don't like is always going to make us feel bad. Just like the simple math here in the U.S., for example, if you create a tool to tamp down on the speech of those you don't agree with, that ultimately that tool will be turned against to you when the political tides change. And that's why, you know, the First Amendment is so valuable and why we've been able to have these incredible freedoms and these incredible technologies here in the U.S.

is that we just haven't quite totally completely lost that yet. But we are here teetering on the cusp and hoping that these ignorant politicians who are leveraging the moral panic about kids' online safety for political points will wake up in time to not completely destroy, like, one of the greatest things that we've ever built, which is the internet. Yeah, that's really bleak. I mean, I think a lot of people in America, too, it's like you see things you're talking about Indonesia or Nepal or these other countries or even Europe. And you're like, well, that could never happen here. It's funny because we're even like point to Russia. It was like 200 VPN span from the app store there. China has the great firewall. And I think that six months ago, a lot of people

in the UK were thinking that exact thing where they were thinking that this could never happen here. We wouldn't cause everybody to have to give their ID or their biometrics up in order to use the internet. And bam, bam, there it is. That is the lived reality of everybody in Britain who isn't using a VPN right now, which is just wild. And we've been on the cusp here in the U.S. for years of passing legislation that would do that exact same thing. Like, it's not quite a coincidence to me in my head that it's U-Cosa that passed and is causing this in Britain. And it's COSA here in the U.S. that is one of the main laws that would become a vehicle for this sort of ID check regime

and the trickle down of, well, if everybody doesn't want to do ID checks, what are they going to do? They're going to use VPNs. What are politicians going to go after next? What's the next boogieman VPN? So how do you decide like what's a good VPN? What's not? Because I feel like there's so many sort of scummy VPNs. And you just mentioned like a lot of them also harvest data or like overcharge you or like you're locked

into some scheme where you're charged every month forever now or like what are the good ones to buy or like what should people look out for if they do want to get a VPN? And when do you think people should consider getting a VPN? Like, is this something that we should all have on our phone right now? I think it's important to think about this the same way that we think about using any other privacy tool like Signal and that the more people use it, the more it becomes normalized, the more it's a clapback against the forces of surveillance capitalism. And yeah, it is a safety tool. It is a tool to not tell people exactly where you are all the time, which I think is pretty great. But you do have to be careful.

The VPNs that are trustworthy are kind of hard to pick out from the sea of other choices. The thing that I would recommend the most that is the best resource that I've found is in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance to Self-Defense Guide. They have a whole article on how to choose VPNs, how to think about things like whether or not the VPN. can actually access and see your traffic, whether they keep logs of where you go, who they're owned by, those sorts of pieces, because it can change depending on the shift in ownership or shift in priorities or shift in privacy policy of the VPN

or what laws they have to comply with in the country that they operate in. So there's a lot of factors to go in there, and you really just have to be an active thinker in terms of who you're trusting to filter your entire online life through their servers to hide it from all the people that we know are not there with good people. intentions. I feel like it's just like a devil's bargain where it's like, well, do you want this probably potentially terrible entity to have all of your data or do you want this definitely

terrible entity to have all of your data? At fight for the future, because we've been working on degougling and getting off of big tech platforms in terms of our day-to-day operations, we actually use that old school method of having it all on a server and then using a VPN just securely operate at Fight for the Future. So that's been really interesting to think about also in terms of VPNs is what happens to businesses that are increasingly relying once again on their own servers and on technology that they control if these VPN are banned. Yeah. No, that totally makes sense. And it's funny that like this thing that started as this business solution is now maybe weeping back again to be this thing that businesses and people all rely on. One example here is that we just

had two folks go to a conference in Portugal. And while they were there, while they deleted all of the info off of their phones and devices and what have you when they were doing border crossings, they could log on to our VPN and remotely access all of our tech tools. And if that conference had been in Britain, they would have been able to browse the internet as if they were in Chicago or wherever because the VPN was operating from that location. it's actually incredibly important to us to have the ability to do that sort of secure operation. I mean, you were saying earlier that it's helpful for VPN use to be normalized and for

regular people to use it. So that way, if they do or when they do try to ban it, it's much harder. And I am trying to think like what that would take. Like, what do you think people could do to normalize the use a little bit more? Because I feel like aside from advertising, which all these VPN companies do all the time, it still just doesn't feel necessary day to day, I think, to most people. For a lot of people, I think it's becoming increasingly necessary. A lot of it is just a barrier of education and awareness of how our location data is being used,

which may be to an extent generational, where I know that there are a lot of younger folks who are very where all the time that their phone is tracking where they are. And it seems, though, that in terms of mass mobilization and really getting people to pay attention and to advocate for these last-ditch tools for the internet that we all want to have, is you start taking things away from them. I think it's like 25 different states have passed various age check porn bans or what have you now. And I believe that that's pretty motivating. Even thinking back to the example of Nepal just recently, again,

there was one VPN provider that said their usage had spiked 8,000 percent. And in just a couple of days when Nepal cut off access to social media, I think as these walls go up, we're going to very rapidly see a lot of people get VPN pilled, as it were, because they're not going to have any other option. And that's going to become pretty easy to organize around, I hope, at least, because people are going to fight for the Internet that they want. Well, so what are you guys doing to fight for VPN? Because I know you guys have, like, a campaign kind of going and you're trying to raise awareness.

So, you know, for people that do want to get a little bit more involved, aside from just using it themselves, like what sort of campaign are you guys launching to protect access to this technology? So this is pretty nihilistic, but one of our base analyses of politicians is that you just have to make doing the bad things scarier than not doing anything at all. And so for VPN vans, we are organizing to try and make some noise to preclude that thought process when lawmakers look at VPN. in use and think, oh, let's just ban that.

On September 25th, we just did this huge day of action where we had folks call their lawmakers, did this petition signing, and social media posts and work with influencers and all the above to really raise awareness of the threat against VPNs and also why they're so important. I am so excited for everything that we were able to accomplish on that day and still have going. actually at defendvpns.com. We have tools to contact lawmakers that are up there, really easy

call tools that make it a no-brainer to get in contact with all of your representatives if you're here in the U.S. And we also have a petition that folks can sign and we're planning to do more. And if you sign that petition, you'll be signed up to know when we next take action. Awesome. Well, excited to go to Defendvpns.com. Defendvpns.com. Leah, well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. And thank you so much for all of the work that you're doing to protect a free and open internet. It's been such a pleasure. Taylor, thanks so much for having me.

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