“This demonstrates the value of not being seen.” Monty Python.
Monty Python fans know that being seen, when you don’t wish to be, can be bad. It might involve explosions. While ‘being seen’ as you browse the Internet may not be quite so dire, if you do nothing to prevent it, you are under constant surveillance as you traverse the web. Your privacy will not be respected.
A Virtual Private Network, or VPN, is one of the simplest and most effective ways to protect your privacy online and reduce your digital exhaust. Without a VPN, when you connect to the Internet through your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or a public Wi-Fi service, all the sites you visit are recorded and used to create a profile of your activities. They also record your physical location and the identity of the device you are using.
An ISP connects your home or business to the Internet. Major U.S. service providers include Comcast, Charter Communications (Spectrum), Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Xfinity, and Cox Communications. ISPs collect a lot more data about you than you might expect, and provide few options for you to control how your data is being used. The Federal Trade Commission’s 2021 report on ISPs provides details about the information that ISPs collect. You may find it at: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2021/10/ftc-staff-report-finds-many-internet-service-providers-collect-troves-personal-data-users-have-few . Note: it’s long and a bit scary.
Public Wi-Fi services do much the same.
A VPN protects you from this surveillance by creating an encrypted tunnel between your device and a VPN server managed by the VPN service provider. From there, you can access the Internet while appearing to be at the location of the VPN server. This also hides the identity of the sites you are visiting from your ISP or public Wi-Fi service provider.
I very strongly recommend that you use a VPN on every digital device—desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone—that connects to the Internet. A VPN:
- Prevents your ISP from collecting information on every website you visit, when you visited it, and for how long.
- Inhibits your ISP’s ability to throttle or charge extra for different types of content. Content types include email, web browsing, video streaming, and multiplayer gaming.
- Prevents hackers from intercepting your data when connecting to public Wi-Fi services. This is particularly important.
- Facilitates bypassing censorship and location-based access restrictions by hiding your device identity and your physical location.
I strongly recommend that you use a VPN in conjunction with other privacy preserving products and services, such as a secure web browser, privacy preserving web search, and secure communications protocols. Note that a VPN does NOT:
- Protect your data once it leaves the VPN server in transit to a website or other service. Use of an end-to-end encrypted communications protocol is required. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (https) is the most common example.
- Provide anonymity when connecting to a website or other service. Preserving anonymity requires, among other things, a secure web browser.
A VPN may impose a small performance penalty and your Internet browsing may be a little slower. I don’t find this noticeable. And a competent and trustworthy VPN is not free. As we discussed in the post, “Show Me the Money,” maintaining a worldwide network of VPN servers costs money and you should expect to pay for it.
I strongly recommend AGAINST using free VPN services. If you do so, you are the product and you should not expect your privacy to be respected. There are several hundred free VPN services available and many of them are sketchy.
For extra credit, and if you are technically confident, consider installing a home router VPN application to protect all the devices in your home, including those that don’t support an installed VPN application. Installing VPN software on your current router can be challenging, and your existing router may not have sufficient processing power to accommodate the load. If you are comfortable managing your home router, and your budget will support it, I recommend purchasing a new router with your preferred VPN software pre-installed. The website for your VPN service will provide links to the routers they partner with.
And one last thought, if you also use a home firewall product such as Firewalla (https://firewalla.com/), connect the firewall inside the VPN. Otherwise, the VPN may inhibit some of the useful functions of the firewall. So in order from outside to inside: the modem that connects your home to your ISP, your home wireless router with the VPN installed, your firewall, every digital device in your home that connects to the Internet.
In the next post, I provide some criteria to assist you in selecting a VPN service, recommend two commercial services, and see how our friends Alice and Bob implemented VPN services.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.