Do you want to buy a VPN? I've got VPNs to make you unhackable; VPNs that will make your dinner;
or however a VPN to make you more attractive, eh?
There are a lot of misleading claims made about the supposed benefits of VPNs.
Especially the ones I just made - that was a joke. In this video I'll
explain how a VPN works, dispel a few myths about them,
and tell you how they actually can be useful so you can make sure you're not wasting your money.
Welcome back to The Pro Tech Show. I got a comment from Bret R recently that amongst other things
said "I hope you will be doing a VPN video soon". I actually had no intention of doing one but the
idea agree on me and here we are. In fact, three of the last four videos I've recorded
have been viewer requests so get commenting if you have an idea for something you'd like to see.
VPNs are nothing new in the business world. People have been using them to do their work for...
probably decades. The use of personal VPNs has become much more common in recent years, though.
It does seem like a lot of people are talking about VPNs these days so let's explore why that is.
I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is privacy. There have been a number
of very public scandals and your average person is becoming much more aware that their online
activities are being tracked. Many VPNs claim to solve at least part of this problem and
this is one of the big reasons they've seen a growth in popularity. The other big reason
lots of people are talking about VPNs is that they're being paid to talk about VPNs.
Even with a small channel like mine I have been approached several times by VPN companies offering
to pay me to talk about their services. Even if we ignore direct sponsorship VPN companies are
very active within affiliate marketing. If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing: when
YouTubers put links to products they've reviewed they're often what's called "affiliate links".
That means if you click on one of those links and make a purchase the YouTuber gets a share
of the profit for referring a customer. Amazon runs one of the biggest affiliate programs out
there. They typically play the YouTuber (or blogger, whatever) somewhere around one to
three percent of the sale. NordVPN pay 40 percent (with a zero) and I've seen others that pay more.
I could make a video about the top five VPNs and if you clicked on any of them, it doesn't matter
which one, I'd get paid. This isn't a conspiracy, it's just marketing. If someone makes that top 5 VPNs
video then as long as they're providing people with valuable information they deserve to get
paid for their work. It costs more time and money than you probably realise to make videos like this.
Why would they work for free? Would you? I do this as a hobby so I'm not reliant on income
from YouTube but there are plenty of people who do rely on advertising revenue in order to feed their
families. For any channel worth watching their reputation is going to be worth more to them
than the advertising revenue from a single video, so they won't lie to you for a quick dollar; but
money talks. If you happen to see a brand getting a disproportionate amount of airtime on any media,
social or mainstream, it might mean they're doing something new and exciting; but it probably
just means they paid for it. This video isn't sponsored, nor are there any affiliate links in
the description; but if you do want to support the channel then please like, comment, and share
the video. That helps the channel grow and doesn't cost you a penny. Moving on to what a VPN is... it
stands for Virtual Private Network and is used to connect one device to another device or network
over the internet. It's very much like plugging one end of a network cable into your computer
and the other end into somebody else's computer, except instead of the cable being made of copper
it's made of encryption and instead of running along your carpet it's running along the internet.
Companies use this all the time to connect different offices together and to connect
people working from home to resources at those offices. They could literally run a fibre cable
to each building, but that's expensive and there's no way they're going to pay for a dedicated fibre
to be laid all the way to the home of every employee. VPNs are a much more cost effective
way to virtually plug your device into the main corporate network. A personal VPN does exactly
the same thing but instead of plugging into your work you're plugging your device into a network
belonging to your VPN provider. Let me say that again: your computer is plugged into their network.
If you do use a VPN, make sure the provider is trustworthy because you're effectively giving
them network access to your computer. Why would you do this? For a business VPN it's fairly obvious.
Plugging into work network gives you access to your work files. For a personal VPN it's less about
sharing information with your VPN provider. It's more about borrowing their internet connection. It
will send all of your internet traffic over the VPN and out their connection. Websites that
you visit will see the traffic coming from the internet connection of the VPN provider
instead of yours. This doesn't magically make your internet any faster. Anything you send out of your
VPN provider's connection has to go out of your connection first to get to your VPN provider. You
can't exceed the speed of your own connection. In fact it will usually make things slower because of
that extra layer of encryption around it that uses up some of your bandwidth. There are some specific
cases where it can help with speed by working around artificial throttling limits if your ISP
imposes them; but as a general rule you'll have a little less bandwidth and your latency is going to
take a hit because you're effectively sending every connection out over the internet twice
instead of just the once. The fact that your final point of egress for internet traffic belongs to
the VPN provider is what many people claim protects your privacy; but let's examine that
in a bit more detail shall we? There are specific use cases where a VPN really can help protect your
privacy. If you're using BitTorrent for example it can make it a lot more difficult for other people
to tie the traffic back to you. Difficult, but not impossible. People have been done for torrenting
copyrighted content while using the VPN. I'm sure you'd only use it to download Linux, though; in
which case why would you need a VPN? For a standard internet use case like browsing the web, though;
the level of protection of VPN gives to your privacy is about the same as the level of protection a gum
shield would give you when being hit by a car. It's not accurate to say it does absolutely nothing,
but you're still getting wrecked! To understand this we need to look at how you're routinely
tracked on the internet. There are essentially two points at which this tracking happens
there's your internet service provider (your ISP) and there are the websites that you're actually
visiting. Let's look at your ISP first. When you visit a website your computer needs to convert
the name of the website that you typed into an IP address it can connect to. It does this by querying
the service called DNS which is basically a big directory of the internet. With most home networks
your ISP can see those DNS requests. So they can see you looked up the IP address for youtube.com.
They can't see what videos you watched on YouTube, though; that's because the traffic between your
computer and the vast majority of websites is already encrypted. VPNs brag about military grade
encryption because it sounds good. What they don't tell you is that most websites already use the
same military grade encryption anyway - VPN or not. So your ISP can figure out that you visited a
particular website but they have no way of seeing what you actually did there. It is possible to hide
these DNS requests from your ISP in which case their information is even more limited.
They can't see what websites you've looked up but they can see what IP addresses you connected to.
That might be enough to identify that you visited a particular website, but it might also tell them
nothing more than you visited one of the literally millions of different websites that connect using
Cloudflare. Using a VPN will hide this information from your ISP if configured correctly. All they'll
be able to see is that you connected to the VPN. After that the traffic is somewhere else and
they can't see it. But if your ISP has no way of seeing what you do on the websites beyond maybe
looking up the name of them, how come if you look at a pair of jeans online you suddenly
get jeans advertised you everywhere you go? There's clearly a lot more detailed tracking going on here.
The amount of detail that advertisers can find out about you is quite disturbing but
all that information is being slurped up by the websites you're visiting. They use tracking cookies,
advertising pixels, and browser fingerprinting to uniquely identify you and track every interaction
you make across many different websites. Some VPN providers will tell you that by hiding your real
IP address they prevent these people from tracking you. That's complete rubbish. They don't care about
your IP address because it's not a reliable way to track you, anyway. Most people's IP address changes
when their router reconnects (or modem if it's separate). Your phone's IP address likely changes as you walk
down the street. They have much better ways to track you and the VPN does nothing about them.
As long as your computer connects to a website that website will track you. It doesn't matter
if it's directly from your internet connection or via your VPN provider's internet connection.
They're tracking your browser, not your IP address. If you log in they can track your account. If you
don't they can track you using cookies. If you block the cookies they can track you using browser
fingerprinting. The VPN stops none of this. The same goes for hacking. Anyone claiming a VPN will
stop people hacking your accounts because they can't see your IP address is talking rubbish.
Hackers aren't trying to break into your home IP address - that would be a massive waste of their
time. The only way that would even work would be if you'd forwarded internet accessible ports through
to a vulnerable device and that would still be there if you had a VPN on your computer or not.
How do hackers really get you? They're sending you phishing emails, embedding malware on websites that
you visit, getting hold of your login details from websites that have been breached and using them to
try logging into your other accounts. None of this relies on your location or your IP address, and it
all works exactly the same with a VPN connected. Don't buy a VPN to protect yourself from hackers.
I've got a series of videos giving you some basic tips that'll be a lot more effective.
To avoid any confusion, I'm talking about VPNs. Actual VPNs. I can tell you that a
VPN will not protect you from viruses, and that is true. I am aware that companies who sell VPN
services might also sell you antivirus software as well. If you buy that in a bundle then yes, the
overall bundle will protect against viruses; but it's the antivirus software doing that, not the VPN;
and you don't need the VPN to get it. Just making that clear because the marketing people might not.
OK, VPNs are a waste of time then? Not quite. They're just very situationally dependent. I'm
not sold on the argument of hiding my traffic from my ISP. Do I want my ISP snooping on me? Not really,
but if I use a VPN then everything I've hidden from my ISP is exposed to my VPN provider instead.
Isn't that just moving the problem? Do I trust the VPN provider any more than I trust my ISP?
Even if I do trust their intentions, do I trust their ability to protect my data?
Remember that unlike my ISP the VPN provider or anyone who hacked that VPN provider could
have a direct connection into my laptop. At least there's a network firewall between me and my ISP!
A lot of this comes down to a question of trust. I'm not naïve. I know ISPs are corporations, and
profit is profit. In the UK, though; we have pretty good privacy laws. They're not perfect, and we
have a government that seems to think backdooring encryption sounds like a good plan (it's really
not); but by and large our rights are a lot better protected than in many other countries. That is of
course just a relative comparison. Edward Snowden, blah blah blah. If you're using a VPN that connects
to another country and that country has laws that say the government can just rock up and slurp
data from any operation running within their border... does that make you safer, or less safe?
That's a bit of a rhetorical question for you to go ponder yourself. I don't use a personal
VPN but there is a mirror image of the question I just posed you that's also worth considering.
What if I lived in or was visiting a country that didn't have the same privacy laws as the UK?
A country where all of your internet traffic was inspected by an authoritarian government?
If I go on Twitter and like a tweet by the opposition party I don't have to worry
about the police dragging me out of my house and carting me off to jail. There are countries in the
world where that sort of thing is unfortunately a reality. If I was visiting one of those countries
I don't think I'd so much as check my emails without a VPN! Although... come to think of it... I'm not
sure using a VPN in that sort of country is going to be legal. Look, if that's you, don't break any laws
because of something I said. I'm just saying what I'd do. You're responsible for your own actions.
Another potential use case for VPNs is accessing services that are geo-locked.
By that I mean content that isn't available in certain countries. This is common with media
streaming services. For example, in the UK we have the BBC iPlayer. This appears to be free to use.
There is no bill to pay our subscription to buy, but it's actually funded by British people paying
for their TV licences. Because it's paid for by British people it's not available outside the UK;
because you didn't pay for it. If I went to visit a friend in America I wouldn't be able to access
it because it would see my IP address and think I'm American. If I used a VPN to connect from
America to the UK and watch iPlayer it would work because it would see the VPN's British IP address.
In the case of the iPlayer, though; the BBC doesn't actually let you do that. Practically speaking
I doubt they could stop you, but even though I'm British and I pay my TV license bill it's against
the terms of use to go and use a VPN to bypass geo restrictions. Just because a VPN will let
you access geo-locked content doesn't necessarily mean it's something that you're permitted to do. As
before, you're going to have to figure out what is and isn't allowed with regard to your chosen service
and make your own decision. Don't blame me if you get yourself in trouble - I didn't tell you to do it!
The final use case for VPNs that I think is actually a sensible one
is for protection when using public Wi-Fi. There is an inherent risk when using public
Wi-Fi because you don't know who manages it and it's not necessarily obvious that the Wi-Fi
hotspot is even legitimate. I could go sit in Starbucks create a Wi-Fi hotspot on my laptop
called "Free Starbucks Wi-Fi" and how would you know any different? If the hotspot is malicious by design,
or even by accident because it was compromised, it could be used to spoof websites and steal information....
in theory at least. In practice, remember I said that most websites now use encryption? That means
the owner of the hotspot can't see what you're doing, and they can't spoof the website without you
getting a security warning. The way around this was for the bad guys to offer up unencrypted versions
of the spoofed website instead; but most modern browsers will now flag such sites as "not secure".
So whilst in theory public Wi-Fi can't be trusted, in practice you can generally still trust the
website you access through public Wi-Fi as long as you actually pay attention to any security
warnings your browser presents you with. Seriously, if you're using a public Wi-Fi hotspot and you
get a security warning whilst browsing around then just stop and tether to your phone or something.
Sometimes you will get a security warning when they display their
initial captive portal splash page because of how they intercept your browser request,
but after you're logged on to the hotspot and are actually on the internet then the security
warnings are there for a reason. Something isn't right! Do you need a VPN to use a public hotspot?
No. You can just use common sense browsing habits. A VPN just makes it easier because as long as the
VPN is connected the hotspot can't interfere with your web browsing and try to hijack your session.
You don't need a VPN, but not everybody has sufficient common sense when it comes to
the internet, and even if you do there's a fair argument that connecting to a VPN just makes life
easier because you don't need to bother paying attention to what you click on. OK, no. You still
need to pay attention. Just not as much attention. Just use common sense - it's still the internet!
It's not something I'm particularly worried about, personally, but I think this is a valid use case
for a VPN. It's a bit of peace of mind if nothing else because you've eliminated one potential risk.
So what VPN do I recommend? I don't. For the simple reason that I don't use one myself so recommending
one would be a little hypocritical. I don't live in a country where I live in fear of the government,
I don't need access to geo-locked content, and I very rarely use public Wi-Fi.
Frankly, most public Wi-Fi hotspots want me to trade personal information for internet access and
why would I do that when I just tether to my phone instead? If you ever wondered why they all
want to log in with your Facebook account, it's so they can scrape information from your profile and
use it to sell you stuff. If for some reason I had to use public Wi-Fi I'd rather trust myself with
my safety than some random VPN provider; and if I'm honest... I don't want to pay for it. That all
said, there are legitimate reasons to use a VPN. A lot of the claims they make are incredibly
misleading but whilst I'm not going to recommend a VPN to you I'm not going to recommend against
using one, either. Provided you know why you need one and you haven't been mis-sold, then crack on.
It's your money. If you're particularly untrusting and don't believe your ISP, government, or any VPN
providers; then you could always pay for a cloud server somewhere and build your own personal
VPN service on it to use. Just make sure to check out this video about cloud providers because the
bit about outbound data transfer could really screw you over if you don't plan for the costs.
That's all I've got for you today. If you found this video useful then drop me a big old like,
and look deep into your heart and see if it's telling you to subscribe
(it is). There are a couple of other videos on this side of the screen that you may enjoy next. If
you're still watching, it's time to click them now. Alright... thanks for watching, guys. See you next time!