With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, companies had the possibility to continue operating with their employees working from home, if they wanted communications between workers and the company to be secure, they had to hire a VPN. With this simple data, we can already get an idea of whether VPNs are really safe or is it a myth.
VPNs are not only intended to protect communication between two points, encrypting all content from sender to receiver and vice versa, but they also prevent our ISP (internet provider) from knowing the websites where we browse. If you want to hire a VPN connection, first of all you should know that not all of them are the same and what their main uses are.
What is a VPN
The acronym VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, a completely secure connection that we establish between our equipment and the company's servers that offers us the service. All the data that we send from our equipment to the VPN provider is encrypted, just like the data we receive, so that neither our internet provider, nor any other person who has access to the content that we send and receive, can decrypt.
The VPN servers were in charge of sending us the content of the pages we visited, using an IP different from ours, so we will never leave a trace of our location. If it is a paid VPN, such as Surfshark or NordVPN, to name a few, we are sure that they will not store any logs of our activity, something that does not happen with free VPNs.
The reason is clear, while paid VPNs are supported by the revenue they earn from users, free VPNs trade with the logs of our internet activity, including our IP, so the anonymity that we can find in these types of connections, disappears completely.
How a VPN works
Every time we use the internet, through our fixed or mobile internet provider, a record is generated and stored in our service provider (ISP), information with which they can market to get extra money. In addition, that information is available to law enforcement agencies through a court order.
Using a VPN, our service provider you will never have access to our activity on the internet, since all the requests we make are sent directly to the VPN service in an encrypted way and it returns the requested information to us also in an encrypted way.
How is it possible that they do not store a record of our activity? Very easy, make use of servers with RAM disks, not traditional hard drives where a record is always stored that later has to be erased. Using RAM memory, all data is automatically deleted every time the device is reset, a process that takes place when we stop using the encrypted connection.
What is a VPN for
Connect safely
VPNs were born with this mission, that of provide secure connections between two computers, one of them being a server where the data is stored. As I mentioned above, the end-to-end, computer-to-server cipher connection, so no one can access and decipher the information that circulates both ways.
Access content from streaming platforms in other countries
Thanks to VPNs we can bypassing the geographical limits of streaming video platforms. By being able to select from which country we want to connect, we will be able to access the available catalog, for example in the United States, Canada, Germany ... We can also use it when we want to view YouTube videos that are not available in our country.
Access foreign sports platforms
Sports rights to most popular sports are geographically limited. While in some countries F1 races or La Liga matches are broadcast on subscription channels, in other countries, they are broadcast through private or public channels without paywalls.
Using a VPN with the IP of the country where the content is available, we can access without any problem and completely free of charge.
Save money buying online
Shopping web pages, such as Amazon or eBay, like travel pages, track our activity through cookies to offer us one price or another, depending on which pages we have previously visited. Using a VPN we will hide our entire browsing trail, including the IP, so that we will obtain prices according to reality and not based on our internet searches.
Protection when using public Wi-Fis
If we take advantage of all the Wi-Fi networks around us, we must take into account that all the information we share, can be intercepted by friends of otherseven if the connection is password protected.
With a VPN, all the information that comes out of our mobile or portable device will be encrypted, in such a way that absolutely no friend of others, will be able to access it.
Access blocked web pages
These types of connections allow users to access web pages that are blocked in some countries, such as China, where these types of connections are prohibited.
Torrent download
In some countries like Germany, if you download content through Torrent, the internet operator will send you a letter notifying you that you are committing an infraction. With a VPN our provider will never know what to do with our connection, if we download files, enjoy streaming video platforms, play online ...
How to choose the best VPN
Once you know the problems of using free VPNs, if we are clear that we need a VPN, before contracting it we must be clear about a series of factors.
Connection speed
Not all VPNs offer us the same connection speed. This is a factor to take into account if we intend to use it to access streaming video platforms in other countries, download movies via torrent ...
Number and types of connected devices
VPNs we can use them from different devices. Before hiring the cheapest one, we must analyze if we can use it from any device (mobile, computer, console, Fire TV Stick ...) and the number of simultaneous connections that it offers us.
Number of servers and countries
Another aspect to take into account is both the number of servers available as the number of countries from where we can connect. There is no use hiring a VPN that offers us 100 servers in Pakistan when we want to connect with an IP from the United States, to give an example that is unfortunately very common.
