How Does a VPN Work to Protect Your Privacy?

Privacy has always remained one of the core things of people’s life like people are required to put locks on filing cabinets and rent those safety deposits boxes at banks. But in this digitized era now we share more information online so online privacy is gaining even more important with time.

Whatever activities we do online leave a trail of data like phone and mail data, credit card transactions, social media accounts, and more crucially personal identifiable information. All activities leave a trail of your personal data which internet or any type of online or offline service providers usually collect and store and sometimes share it with others without your consent. There are many VPN service providers out there like Nord VPN, Surfshark or Tunnel Bear, etc who are providing the best services in their fields.

So in this article, we will shed light on how a good Virtual Private Network (VPN) helps you secure your online traffic against snoopers, spies, and anyone else who can steal or is able to monetize your data while surfing the web.

VPN Secure Privacy

Importance of Privacy

Online privacy means the trait to control information about our private life and our activities even over the internet. We could decide who can access that information. It gives us the power to choose our real thoughts and feelings and we have right to choose who we share them with.

Privacy helps protect our physical safety like real-time location data is a solely private thing and it protects us as individuals or our businesses but against whom? These can be entities we depend on or the ones that are more powerful than us.

So, privacy is part of our freedom but could we really be keeping it free and have our free will without privacy?

Fortunately, now more than ever many technology businesses and other organizations are working hard on improving and maintaining our privacy. Such as VPN can undecipherably hide your information from prying eyes and keep your hands on a measure of your privacy online.

How does VPN work to protect your privacy?

When you switch the VPN on, it masks your IP address and creates a virtual encrypted tunnel between you and a remote server run by a VPN host. VPN diverts Internet traffic through an encrypted tunnel to make your data secure from prying eyes as well. During this process, your true IP address stays hidden as your traffic exits the VPN server hence masking your identity and location.

At the end it makes it impossible for your ISP or public WiFi network owner to see what websites you are browsing or what information you are providing to websites. Even if the resulting data gets accessed, it would be useless.

Benefits of Using VPN

VPN can hide your IP address and online activity. So this attribute of VPN can help you protect your privacy online.

Have you wondered a public WiFi network can help someone able to see your online activity? Considering the forces fall against your privacy this is your reasonable concern. While you would like to use VPN in some specific scenarios.

The very first thing that may come in your mind when you have to think about privilege of the internet with privacy using public WiFi network like at a restaurant or station. Normally, you might connect to a public WiFi network without a second thought. But you also need to know who can watch the traffic on that network like can you even simply consider the WiFi network is legit? What if the WiFi network you are connected to is operated by some nefarious individual?

However, when you are at home you don’t require to think if someone is spying on the Wifi network because you are the owner of the network hardware. But just stop even VPN can help in this case too as your Internet service provider (ISP) has all the data and insight on what you do online with the IP address they provide you. Indeed, the ISP that you pay for accessing their internet service is making money from your data as well. Wait! ok don’t be bothered too much just make VPN your habit while using the internet.

Although companies like Google and Facebook monetize your online behavior you are not forced to use their services so it depends on you. while you don’t always have some choice in the case of your ISP as it provides your home access to the entirety of the internet. Here, VPN does come in handy to protect your privacy.

There is another use case like certain sites are inaccessible or you want to surf a non-localized version of familiar websites or have to visit websites that are banned in your country or location or controlled by your ISP.

VPN gives access to blocked websites. Like some governments block certain websites from access to the local population. VPN creates the tunnel to different countries and makes you able to access blocked sites. By doing so VPN also encrypts all web traffic so in this way it helps to protect your identity at the same time along with unblocking the access to that website.

However, you should keep in mind that VPN is also no guarantee of total protection and it does come with some limitations as well.

Additionally, things like cookies allow companies to look over your internet usage even you’ve left their sites. You need to sort out cookies-related threats and also look for tracker blockers that keep advertisers blind to your activity. Browsing in incognito mode can also be helpful for keeping privacy but not better than VPN if you want to hide your activities from your ISPs. On the other end, VPN providers can also sell your data.

Conclusion

VPN works to protect your privacy as it does anonymize your online activities and your online traffic gets routed through an encrypted tunnel. It is a powerful tool for protecting your online privacy.

Although VPNs are useful but they won’t protect against every threat like hacker attacks, Trojans, viruses or other malware stored in your device. So, you also need to use antivirus software, enable two-factor authentication if available, and make a habit of using a password manager to generate unique and make complex logins for all online accounts.



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