If you listen to the different ad’s for VPN services, you’d think that a VPN makes you completely bulletproof with the Harry Potter Cloak of Invisibility over you. The truth is, well… not so much. It’s not that these commercials and services are outright lying to you, but they’re not being 100% truthful either.
Let’s first explain what a VPN is and a little bit of how it works.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. In one sentence, A VPN is a way of transmitting data from one place to another while encrypting the information in between.
The thing that these services aren’t really telling you is that YES, your data from your computer is encrypted and is being sent to your VPN provider, but what they AREN’T telling you is that from your provider, your data crosses the Internet just the say way it did without your VPN.
So, why are we using a VPN? If it’s only changing where the data is coming from, why should we be using one?
Good question! There are many reasons to use a VPN. A lot of these do center around privacy and security. Examples of this would be:
- To hide your Internet Activity from your Internet Service Provider, when you use a VPN, all your ISP can see is your encrypted traffic from your computer going to your VPN service and back
- To better protect yourself if you’re on a public network, such as a coffee shop, public library, hotel, airport or more. These public places can be a hotspot for hackers, scammers and others to attempt to either steal your information or hack their way into your computer. When you use a VPN connected to these networks, it limits what they can see and attempt to intercept.
But there are things that a VPN DOESN’T do that a lot of people think it does do!
- A VPN doesn’t hide your Internet Activity from the servers you connect to and sites you log in to. If you go to a server and login, you’re telling them who you are and confirming it by providing them with a username and password. Also, just because you’re using a VPN doesn’t mean that you can’t be found or traced, the sites you connect too will still know there is a connection and that connection can be traced back to the VPN Provider, and depending on THEIR privacy policy and how they retain activity logs, that traffic very possibly can still be traced back to you!
- A VPN ONLY hides your traffic as it leaves your computer. It doesn’t do anything to hide what you’re browsing ON YOUR computer. Your browser will still maintain it’s history and logs unless you do something to either prevent that or clear those logs after the fact.
- If you’re using your Internet Providers DNS Servers for name resolution, your ISP is STILL going to see the sites you’re looking to access as those names first need to be resolved (which is what DNS does) before your connection goes off through your VPN tunnel. Even if your DNS traffic goes through the tunnel, it’s still plausible that they ISP (or law enforcement) may be able to identify or track your activity back to you.
Another thing to take note of, using a VPN doesn’t come without a cost. No, I’m not talking about the service (but yes, any reputable VPN service is going to have a monthly or annual fee associated with it), what I’m talking about is sending your traffic through a VPN connection is encrypting it on one side and decrypting it on the other. That’s math, computation, calculations, it takes some computer power to encrypt and decrypt your data and that can and will to some extent impact the performance of your Internet connection.
There’s also the possibility that when you’re using a VPN service, certain sites you may want to browse or see will not work because they block traffic coming from well known VPN services. This could be geo-blocked traffic such as blocked television or entertainment media, country or state specific websites or content, or other reason. Additionally, there are individuals out there who’ve given VPN’s a bad name because they’re used to bypass laws, download illegal content (think copyrighted movies, TV shows, games, etc) or perform other unsavory or questionable acts. I highly encourage your NOT to do this. Illegal is illegal regardless of how you get around the law or restrictions in place. Just don’t do it.
But let’s talk briefly about the good things about a VPN.
- They can make your connections safer or more resilient to local network or malware attacks.
- They can protect your computer, data, and more in public locations
- They can shield your data activity from your local Internet Provider
- They add an extra layer of encryption to your data traversing the Internet (to a point)
- They hide your local IP Address from Internet Sites you visit
- They can help you avoid censorship on sites that might be restricted in certain countries
You can see there are many good reasons to use one! But every coin has two sides and here are the cons of using a VPN.
- Top quality, highly rated, reliable and private VPN services have subscription fee’s which can add up over time
- Performance impact, a VPN needs to perform encryption/decryption of data and will have an impact on your overall Internet speed
- Your traffic, activity and history is only as safe, secure and invisible as your Internet Provider allows. It will boil down to how much do you trust the service to protect you and not simply hand over your activity to whomever asks for it
- Compatibility issues, there are websites, services and other things on the Internet that block traffic from well known VPN services which may impact your ability to browse certain sites or access other Internet resources
- Although not difficult usually to install and maintain, you still need to install the service on your device and maintain it adding complexity should you have Internet or networking difficulties
Are VPN’s worth it? That’s a question each of you will need to answer for yourself as it’s dependent on your particular situation, location and configuration.
For me? Yes, I use a VPN. Which one? Well, that’s a discussion for another blog post! If you use a VPN, let me know which one you use, if you like it, or if you want to know more!
