Sorry if this has been asked before.
Does anyone know if it is worth using a VPN at home? It is a private network and is secured by a password. I know VPNs are to stop people from accessing my data on a public network but don’t know if it is worth having the VPN as always on.
I also know that VPNs can also change my location so I can watch things in other countries but I hardly ever use this feature.
If you’re using https for all of your web sessions and ssl/tls for email, then nobody can access your data anyway. You don’t need a VPN for that.
The information your ISP can collect about you is the addresses you visit, not the information sent.
For an imperfect analogy, think of it as – your service provider has a list of every phone number you called, but they can’t listen to the conversation.
I use various VPNs from home because my ISP is quick to sell that list to anyone who asks for it. But then I’m trusting the VPN owner instead, so make sure you trust them if that’s why you’re using it.
Another benefit is that for anyone checking up on you, you’ll look like you are somewhere other than you actually are. I’d guess that’s why most people on this sub use VPNs.
Of course, these are just side-effects to what a VPN is really for – remotely connecting you to a specific network, for example, to be able to access work computers from home.
That’s it. It’s not magic. I think, perhaps, you’re using a VPN for the wrong reason, and it’s doing nothing to benefit you.
If your ISP blocks access to certain sites a VPN can get around those blocks. If your ISP injects their own advertising into your browsing a VPN can get around this, although an ad-blocker would do the same. If you are doing something you don’t want you ISP to know about use a VPN but other than that I don’t think it is necessary. Using TOR can also get you around those things without having to pay for a VPN.
VPN is to partly hide your activity from special services if you do something good, but restricted with bad laws. If your country blocks several sites and web services, VPN may help.
Nah. Using temporary containers will have a much greater impact on your privacy than using a vpn.
Does anyone know if it is worth using a VPN at home?
That depends; what are you trying to achieve? What are you trying to protect, and which attack vectors are you concerned with regarding those assets?
It’s good for torrenting and accessing the american netflix for me.
Depends on the VPN Provider, worth having a bad VPN? NO! Otherwise Yes if you value your privacy/integrity that is.
I use a VPN at home as it’s Includes Network level ad blocking (as well as trackers/dodgy sites).
75% of the traffic blocked is from my samsung tv.
If you don’t use a VPN at home then every website and app you use will likely know your location while you’re home.
At least when on mobile data, IP-based geolocalization is much less precise.
If you use a VPN at home and on your phone, then apps and websites won’t be able to tell whether you are home or not.
I actually think you phone number analogy works well.
As for ISPs selling your information on, for the most part this is going to lead to advertising and a decent ad-blocker may be a reasonable solution as opposed to a paid VPN service. Your ISP is probably just one of many collecting such data to use for advertising so ad-blockers make sense in general.
You forgot about bypassing geo-restricted content. One of the things I use my VPN for is to watch sports content because I live in a geographic blackout region. Also, there is a lot of subscription content that you cant get in the US, such as CBS All Access shows that are only available in the US if you subscribe to CBSAA, but are available on Netflix if your in Europe or Asia.
Also, TOR is phenomenally slow, and while it’s a sound privacy model, it needs to mature a bit before the masses will adopt it.
There are plenty of articles describing how a determined state entity may well be able to track a person’s activities even if they are using a VPN. Remember that the VPN provider is just providing a tunnel between you and their servers, at some point your activity ends up in the outside world, all you have done is move the exit/entry point from your ISP to the VPN provider.
I don’t really have anything to protect. I just want to make sure people can’t access my personal data.
That would stop you from seeing the ads, but not your ISP collecting and selling data about you to sell to advertisers to target you with. For this reason, I use my VPN virtually all the time.
OP already mentioned geoblocking in their opening post so I left that one off the list but I suspect that for many it will be one of the main uses and was my primary use for a paid VPN although I also run my own VPN server for remote connections to my home network.
TOR is no good for streaming but is fine where speed isn’t essential.
I would always work on the basis that it isn’t but remember even with a VPN your request out has an exit point no more encrypted than your ISP, with a VPN you are shifting the connection to the outside world to the VPN service rather than your ISP.
VPN’s were designed to be an encrypted tunnel between your remote device and your own/company network so that information could be moved between the two in a secure manner.
Imagine that VPN provider is in USA, servers are in USA, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, I’m located in Russia.
You’re contradicting yourself. 
That’s like saying, “I don’t want to protect my home; I just want to make sure people can’t enter.”
Personal data is also a very broad term, and not everything will have the same value to you. If , for example, you use cloud storage (like Google Drive or Dropbox) to store financial documents, you’ll most likely want to encrypt said documents before storing them there, use a password manager to keep track of a sufficiently long password, and use 2FA. You might be significantly less concerned with people determining from your browsing habits that you’re using these sites in the first place.
Assuming that it’s your browsing habits (the sites you visit) that you want to secure and keep private, then a VPN is definitely worth considering. Just understand that your VPN provider will have access to this data, so it’s important to pick one that you trust.
You could consider using /r/tor for increased online anonimity. Other than that I suggest you poke around /r/privacy and /r/privacytoolsIO a bit to get a better sense of what you might want to protect, why, and how.
Edit: typo
Yeah, I do go onto Pornhub a lot so would like to keep my browsing habits secure. Thank you, I will check these subreddits out.