Shield Your Data: Discover the Privacy Perks of VPNs

VPNs have an important role to play in your personal privacy stack but aren't the silver bullet some make them out to be.

VPNs are one of the most discussed digital privacy and security topics out there. They’re also the most commercialized aspect of the internet privacy and security market. Dozens of companies offer VPN services, often for free. Many of those companies use free VPNs as data harvesting traps, which we’ll touch on later.

VPNs are an important online privacy tool, but the value is often oversold and the wrong privacy benefits emphasized. Which is why we decided to do this post even though the general topic of VPNs has thousands of articles across the web.

Welcome to another issue of Secrets of Privacy where we discuss internet privacy related topics and provide practical tips to immediately shield your personal privacy.

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What are VPNs?

Most people are familiar with VPNs through work since many employers require the use of VPNs when connecting to public networks. In that situation, VPNs are a security measure in case the public network is compromised. In effect, your internet traffic goes through a secure pipe on top of the public network. It makes it much harder for a bad actor to access your system and data.

A common personal privacy reason to use a VPN is to hide your IP address. This is important, but not critical. For most people, hiding your IP address isn’t necessary or valuable. That benefit is primarily useful for anyone doing illegal, questionable or dissident type activity. Worrying about IP address leakage for most people should not be a primary concern.

For our American readers, your ISP is allowed by law to track and sell your browsing history. (source) This applies to your home ISP as well as your mobile ISP. Using a VPN keeps your ISP from being able to track and monetize your web traffic.

We love the idea of a whole house VPN. The idea being that instead of running a VPN on your computer or mobile device, the VPN is established at the router level. Alternative, you can grab a device like InviziBox that accomplishes the same effect as a VPN on your router.

The problem with a whole house VPN is that could cause a lot of administrative headaches. For example, when your non-techy family member encounters a website that won’t operate correctly with the whole house VPN running and calls you to troubleshoot. Weigh the pros and cons of that scenario before going down that route.

The top internet privacy use cases for a VPN are: