If you work in digital marketing there’s a version of this conversation that is genuinely uncomfortable. VPNs are great for privacy and individual users have every reason to use them. But from a marketing and advertising perspective, widespread VPN use is basically a nightmare scenario and it’s worth being honest about why.
The most powerful advertising platform right now is Meta. Instagram and Facebook ads are effective to the degree that they are because Meta knows an enormous amount about the people using their platforms. They know what you spend money on, what content you engage with, how long you linger on certain posts, what you search for, what you buy. That data is what makes targeting so precise. You’re not just throwing an ad out into the void and hoping the right person sees it. You’re putting it in front of someone who has already demonstrated through their behavior that they’re likely to be interested.
When someone uses a VPN, that whole system breaks down. The location data is wrong. The profile is harder to build. The targeting gets significantly less accurate. From a pure advertising effectiveness standpoint, a user with a VPN is worth a lot less to the platform than one without.
So does that mean marketers should be anti VPN? Honestly no, and not just because that would be a weird hill to die on. The reality is that if privacy tools became so widespread that targeted advertising stopped working the way it does now, advertising would just go back to looking like it did before the internet. Billboards. TV spots. Print ads. Broad reach, no targeting, just put the message in front of as many eyeballs as possible and hope the right ones are paying attention. That world still worked for businesses. It was just less efficient.
There’s also something worth acknowledging about what mass data collection actually means for people on the receiving end of it. Companies knowing everything about you and using that information to influence your behavior is not a neutral thing. People have started to figure that out and VPN adoption has grown because of it. That’s a rational response to a real thing that’s happening, not paranoia.
The AI angle makes this even more interesting going forward. Tools like ChatGPT and other AI assistants learn from your interactions and start shaping their responses based on your history and preferences. That sounds helpful and sometimes it is. But it also means you’re getting a personalized version of information rather than a neutral one. Using a VPN and going in without a profile attached means you get the broad default answer instead of the one that’s been tailored to what the algorithm thinks you want to hear. For certain kinds of research that’s actually the more useful output.
The internet is trending toward less anonymity overall with age verification requirements popping up across more platforms and more legislation pushing for real identity verification tied to online accounts. VPNs are one of the few tools regular people have to push back against that in a practical way without needing to be a tech expert. And interestingly as AI tools become more accessible, building your own privacy solutions is becoming more realistic for everyday people too. What used to require serious technical knowledge is getting more accessible and that shift in who has access to these tools is going to be one of the more interesting things to watch over the next few years.
For now though, if you’re a marketer the honest answer is you just have to accept that some portion of your audience is going to be masked and build your strategy around the data you do have rather than assuming you have a complete picture. Because the complete picture is getting harder to come by and that trend is probably not reversing.
