One wise and modest beyond his years man once drew the following analogy: “The World Wide Web is the jungle, where the user is the last link of the food chain.” And VPNs are chameleon genes that can help you disguise yourselves. And in the modern world, where social networks follow you without your permission, where your data enter the public domain through information leaks from websites, and states and corporations block your access to everything they want, VPN is exactly what is needed.
What is a VPN in general ? In fact, a Virtual Private Network is a transit center for traffic. A simple and sophisticated “weapon from more civilized times,” the VPN takes your request on itself and redirects it to where it’s needed. So, the traffic is already coming not from you, but from the VPN, the server of which can be located either in Antarctica, or in Atlantis, even on the Moon. So what will a virtual private network protect you from?
From spying
It’s obviously. Following the links, surfing the web, by means of cookie, you let websites to collect your IP address and other personal data through which you can be tracked. But in the modern world there are no innocents, but only precedents. And even if you have nothing to hide, you facilitate the work of those who are able to prove the opposite to you.
VPN disguises your traffic, hides your IP address. And all your trails will lead the creeps to is a blank wall in the form of a server in Zimbabwe, where they speak English worse than I do Mandarin.
From blocking
It’s very fun to observe how, due to political, commercial or simply geographical disagreements, the service you like is not available in your country. And we don’t even speak about banned sites of any kind, but, for example, about Spotify.
If you arrived in a country where the service is not supported, so you lost your audio library. Decision? VPN You enter Spotify through a server in a country supporting the service, and that’s all, use it so much as you need!
From spontaneous traffic
The advantage of a VPN is that you can us such networks in business too. If all the traffic in your company goes through the corporate virtual network, you get the addresses of all the websites visited by employees. You can monitor the performance of individual employees and even data leakage.
And in the most extreme cases you can just disable access to unwanted websites in the settings of the corporate VPN server. This also works.
Traps and pitfalls
But wait, is it possible to monitor user activity through a VPN? And to block access? In fact, the network should protect against this, shouldn’t it? It should do nothing to anyone. This is a tool that can be used as you like. Only one more additional source of access to traffic and nothing more.
At that, one VPN service is different from another. Free VPNs, for example, often support their servers by selling your personal data to advertisers who, based on this data, show you ads. And this is considered the norm, because it’s for free after all. Yes, minus one plus (sounds nice), there is no protection from spying, but bypassing locks is still available.
Paid VPNs are a completely different story. Given that even among them there may be cunning
and sneaky ones, selling both the service to you and the data to advertisers, the most famous VPN services are most often real bastions of freedom. The very same chameleon gene that allows you to survive on the modern Internet.