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Most of the time in a casual, public, marketing or just generally not technical setting, "VPN" is just the modern tern for "Proxy". I'm not sure why that happened to be honest, except maybe that "Virtual Private Network" is more marketable than "Proxy"?

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Maybe because proxies got a bad name from sketchy free proxies? There are sketchy free VPNs now, but "Businesses use VPNs for security" is a pretty powerful idea, I guess.

I can understand this argument.

The term "proxy" immediately brings me back to the days of trying to bypass the high school content filters using sketchy foreign proxies…

I still remember the day I leveled up by setting up an SSH tunnel via my family's PC and walking into school with putty.exe on a thumb drive!

This is a very technical solution. I just asked my homeroom teacher, who was also the schools main IT guy, to unblock whatever website I wanted. He was pretty cool. Also installed Visual C# for me on the schools computers so I could program during my down time.

That's a good point. If you're under 40, "Proxy" probably conjures images of those free proxies you mention. Over that, I have to believe you're going to favor the legal terminology at first blush.

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