I do cause I like to pirate things

I've tried using Youku here before, but I guess the Firewall must work both ways or something, because I have a lot of trouble getting it to work here. I assume it's reliable inside of China, though.

I used a vpn for work, never for home use. I looked into a few once when I wanted to see some tv shows that were blocked for my country. Yet paying for a vpn to 'pirate' the occasional tv show kinda defeats the purpose :p Then Netflix got better and now it seems I'll never run out of stuff to watch.

That's strange. It might have been my Adblock, then.

No, definitely not. Using a free one is, in most cases, really, really stupid, and I don't have enough need to pay for one. Besides, even paying for one is not a guarantee of the VPN service provider being a good one.

My friend uses it for a few things. One being for Elite Dangerous. Because he has to force his game to connect to a US server. In order for the MP mode to sync with me correctly. And not be a ghost.

If you pirate and use a VPN you are at least a smart pirate, once the bills start dropping they will most likely just punish the easy-to find people

Yeah a free one is generally not adviced but a paid one makes a lot of sense if they have good policies and they turn you in you still have an agreemenent they didn't keep and it puts you in a much better position.

Obviously I understand people who use and not use them but when you have region locked content, pirate content or when you just want to be safer on the internet in general its really a good idea to pay up. I am happy to see a large percentage of VGChartz users are also on board with protection their internet usage :)

VPNs are absolutely useless for the most part IMO.

If the government wants to track you because you broke a law, they can and they will. Otherwise no one cares about you. You are completely unimportant, just like everybody else here. There are billions of people out there, you can't honestly believe that any government or company can track all of them and make use of the gathered information.

You do leave quite a few traces btw.. Username, your profile information and so on.

A commen way to track people downloading copyrighted content is for the company to distribute it themselves by doing this they gain access to the data of other peers and in that way they know who downloaded the content.

When you use a VPN one adress is connected to hundreds or more people and the data behind it is encrypted making it unable for them to see who you really are. 

Hiding something (e.g. piracy, your general browsing when using public WiFi) and getting around restrictions are the two only things that come to my mind when I try to think of good reasons to use VPN (for general use). For almost everything else, VPN offers pretty much no benefit. If you have a reliable VPN provider (i.e. a good paid one), it shouldn't hurt to use VPN for other stuff either, but if you're using a free VPN, you should only be using it when you really need it and disable at all other times.

Just to clarify it for others: If you think you're protecting your internet use by using a free VPN, you're probably just endangering it unless you're turning it on only when you really need it (e.g. to circumvent regional restrictions or hide piracy and then disable VPN when you're done). A VPN service costs money to run, and if you're not paying for the service with your money, you're paying for it in some other way. It could be ads, or it could be your data, but you're paying for it somehow.