As the Motion Picture Association’s site-blocking drive lands back on home turf, countries that have already implemented their own site-blocking programs are evaluating their effectiveness. A new survey carried out by French anti-piracy agency Arcom reveals how internet users circumvent blocking and their preferred tools. More importantly from a piracy mitigation perspective, the survey reveals why users feel the need to circumvent blocking in the first place.
The name the website is giving them is weird, it’s officially the “Regulatory Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication”, their mission is the same (fighting piracy) so it doesn’t really matter but it’s still weird to call them by one of their tasks.
Anyway this is an interesting study because of the data, but the reading is obviously biased, they imply that the use of VPNs and what they call “alternative DNS” (yeah guess what, if my ISP blocks websites I’m still going to access them) is suspicious, they do mention security/privacy as one of the usages (it’s the two main motivations for the majority of users in their results).
Something interesting : NordVPN is the most used by the panel, I think it’s reasonable to explain it by the heavy marketing NordVPN did on french youtube (almost every big youtuber had an ad segment with them), but their results say otherwise, 35% of the panel says it’s based on recommendations from closed ones.
I don’t know why some in the panel of 3000 people would self report as pirating, it sounds dumb to admit to an infraction to the law.
Edit : Their conclusions are absolutely busted, an example: 26% people using a VPN reported data privacy was their main reason (for 49% it was one of the motivations), next is securing their data against breaches for 23% (44%), piracy fall down as the 6th motivation with 7% (17%) ; their conclusion? “The choice of a VPN is rather simple, to not be tracked and access illegal content” what kind of botched logic is that
On the bright side, Firefox has a 21% market share in France on desktops, yay!
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Using a VPN makes it a bit harder for your ISP and the French espionage apparatus to siphon your data as much as anyone not using one (ISPs have to keep a history for up to a year as well, it is a legal requirement to make it easier to spy on people). Of course with the laws in Five Eyes countries it won’t actually protect your privacy 100% if you get your VPN service from there but I don’t think France has the budget or capabilities to keep track of every foreign VPN company even with cooperation from other spy agencies.