On this day, the President signed the new legislation that allows all Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) to sell your data for money without your permission. The tech media is now awash in stories about how a VPN can help protect your privacy and deny ISP’s information about your browsing habits. I’ve included a couple of the more relevant stories about how and why you may want a VPN. First, let me give you a short explanation about how they work.
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. Its a technology that allows you to use the Internet in a very private way. Thousands of businesses have been using VPN’s for years to protect their business data. While we all must use an ISP to get on the Net, a VPN is a tunnel through the Net that hides your browsing from and ISP or anyone else.
Let’s say you want to do a Google search. Your ISP will know that you went to Google.com, but your search request goes through a VPN, blocking that info from your ISP. The same with the data coming back from your search. All your ISP knows is you went to Google.
In this case, VPN’s takes your search request and routes it through servers around the US and the world. From there, it goes on to the Internet to Google. The information from Google, is then sent back to the server, then back through the VPN to your computer. A good VPN provider also encrypts your data in both directions making it unreadable to anyone but you, and Google, of course. That is the simple explanation.
What are the downsides? By routing it to another server, your Internet might seem a bit slow. But if you have decent service, you will not even notice any lag time. I have a good service and I don’t notice any slowdown.
Another issue that could arise is the VPN service might also sell your data. But that is extremely unlikely in most cases as that would be the end of that VPN company. Most VPN’s state quite clearly they will not sell your data.
The other downside is that most VPN’s cost money. However there are a couple of free ones. I use Hotspot which is free…but they will send you the occasional advertisement, although I must admit I have yet to see one. Hotspot has a good reputation and has been recommended by tech experts that I trust. And, as I said earlier, I see no lag time in using them.
You can get a VPN as a plug-in for your browser…or as an app that protects your entire computer, no matter what you use. Right now I have the latter version on my Windows computer to see how it works. On my MAC, I currently have Hotspot installed only on my browsers. The Windows computer is my test machine.
Another privacy protection is to use sites that are encrypted. All banks on the Net are encrypted as are many, many other sites. In case you forgot, you can tell if a site is encrypted as it has HTTPS as part of its address. Using a free plug-in called HTTPS Everywhere will encrypt data from many of the major Websites. ISP’s cannot read encrypted data.
I hope the information here is helpful to you in understanding VPN’s. It is such a shame that we must use it to protect ourselves from our own ISP’s and our government. -JRC
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