You can’t have avoided hearing about VPNs lately. Even before the Online Safety Act 2023 put certain online content out of reach without age verification (causing a massive spike in VPN sales), companies were bombarding users with alluring claims and special offers.
But what does a VPN actually offer? How do they work? What are their limitations? What should you look for in a VPN? At worst, VPNs can negatively impact your online experience as well as your tax your bank balance, so make sure you’re not lulled into a false sense of security. Let us cut through the myths and marketing surrounding the VPN hype.
What a VPN does
When your device connects to the internet, it uses a IP address. An IP address is a unique numerical label for a device on a network, like a street address for a house. From an IP address, you can see a person’s approximate geographical location and the name of their internet service provider (ISP).
A VPN is an app that runs on your phone or computer that creates an encrypted connection (or “tunnel”) to another computer. In practice, this computer will be a server in a datacentre, most likely in another country. The purpose of this is to ‘hide’ your public (traceable) IP address, so that when you use the internet it’s harder to locate you and access personal information.
Advantages of using VPNs
The main advantage of a VPN is that it will change your public IP address to a different one. All your web traffic will then flow to and from its destination via the VPN. Depending on the VPN server you are connecting to, you can appear to be an internet user in a completely different part of the world. As well as the obvious security advantage – another layer between you and the outside world – you can use this to unblock otherwise country restricted (“geofenced”) content.
Because all your traffic looks as though it’s coming and going to just one server (the VPN), you are not directly connecting to your desired server. This is a big advantage if your ISP or mobile provider is logging your connection’s activity, which can be requested by the police. Additionally, your DNS requests will be made through a different server, although this can be mitigated without a VPN by using a private DNS server.
VPNs and public WiFi
There’s nothing people love more than free WiFi, and one major selling point of VPNs is to make their use more secure. You may have seen alarming videos showing a hacker with a laptop in an airport lounge stealing users’ login credentials. But while this is hypothetically possible, things have moved on significantly compared to the internet of 15 or 20 years ago.
Although sending sensitive data unencrypted was previously common, now web browsers will flag up warnings before even letting you attempt it. You will also see error messages if a domain name’s security certificate doesn’t match the one it should do. Sensitive data is encrypted before it even leaves your device, so adding another layer of encryption, while this does not do any harm, is not necessary. The chance of anybody intercepting and decrypting your internet traffic at your local train station is truly, vanishingly small.
Limitations and downsides of VPNs
Ultimately it is you that controls what data you are uploading and downloading: the VPN is simply a conduit. Therefore, a VPN will make not protect you from harmful software, stop websites from tracking you, or stop your accounts from being hacked, amongst many other things.
Additionally, because of the encryption overheads and extra routing involved, VPNs can slow down your device and internet connection.
If this guide wasn’t aimed at activists, we probably wouldn’t be advocating the use of VPNs. Your nan who just wants to share cat videos with her friends on Facebook and catch up on EastEnders on iPlayer has no need for one. However, for people who might not want their location and other personal data to be easily traceable, VPNs can protect their privacy.
So, which VPN should I use?
While we don’t recommend any one provider, we would advise to steer away from smaller, unproven providers. It has been the case in the past that a service marketed as “no logs” has proven to be anything but, or have ties to governments. Go with a service which is regularly audited by a third party, such as Proton, IVPN or ExpressVPN. Without an audit, a company is simply saying “don’t worry, you can trust us not to log your activity!” without doing anything to prove it. And as we all know, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Other signs of a good provider are the ability to use a variety of open source encryption protocols and clients (OpenVPN, WireGuard) instead of their own proprietary client software, and the ability to pay anonymously, for example with cryptocurrency.
What alternatives are out there?
You don’t have to use a VPN, or spend money in order to mask your IP address. Here are a few alternatives:
Tor – Unlike a VPN, Tor runs exclusively in its own special web browser, so only works for browsing websites, not any other apps. It works by routing your traffic through many different computers in order to add several layers of obfuscation. It’s free, but due to the nature of the technology can be slow.
Free VPNs – some providers like Proton will offer a free, slower version of their service. Alternatively, there are privacy-orientated browsers like Vivaldi and Brave which have free VPNs built in, but these only protect activity inside the browser, not any other apps.
Web proxies – a proxy website is a web server that retrieves a website and then recreates it in your web browser. This isn’t a great solution as they don’t work with every website, are often slow and due to their unknown provenance it is not advised to submit sensitive data such as logins through them. But if you need to hide your IP address and cannot install any kind of software on the device you’re using, they’re better than nothing.
VPS – a more technically elaborate but cheaper alternative to a VPN provider is to rent a virtual private server (VPS) on which to run VPN server software, a proxy server, or other self-hosted services. This is far beyond the scope of this article, so ask your techie friends if this appeals to you.
In summary
A VPN is not a magic wand that will secure your every online move, it is a useful tool to keep your data more secure.
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