What VPN should I use?
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So for a variety of reasons, VPNs have become popular,
I'll say, in a lot of the news media
and advice columns that you might see related to technology.
Unfortunately, in many cases they're
touted as being, I'll say, a one stop solution to all of your security woes.
And of course, that's clearly not the case.
There are some scenarios where VPNs can be really, really helpful,
but they are specific cases, and I want to go over what those cases
are, and I'll recommendation for a couple of VPN services that I happen to use.
So the very first one that comes to mind is something that will protect you if you
are using open WiFi or if you're using somebody else's Internet.
That is a protection from what I call sniffing.
It's most obvious when you're in an open WiFi hotspot.
If you're at the coffee shop and there's
no password on the WiFi, you can just connect it.
What that means is that your connection is not encrypted.
That means that anybody within range with a laptop or any other WiFi enabled
device could theoretically listen in to the communications between your
laptop, your device, and wherever it is you're communicating to.
If your data isn't encrypted in flight, then it could be there in plain text.
Now, a lot of places use Https, and that solves this problem,
but the sites you're visiting are still exposed to anybody who's looking.
Any site that uses plain old Http, however, is not encrypting data,
and everything you're doing can be seen by someone who is sniffing the network.
A VPN encrypts the entire connection,
in other words, to anybody watching, regardless of the connection type.
Your data looks like noise.
It just looks like encrypted data.
The only connection that they can see you making is to the VPN service you happen
to be using, and everything else you're doing is routed through the VPN in its
encrypted form, http, Https, private protocols, all of it all through the VPN.
Now I use open WiFi hotspots as perhaps the most obvious case, but in reality,
any Internet connection where you may not trust the provider of that connection is
a place where a VPN can protect you from this kind of sniffing.
Hotels are another great example where
even if you use the wired connection in your room, I've heard stories of people
accessing the routers and the other information in the hotel basement
and actually monitoring what the visitors or what the hotel guests were doing
online, a VPN, again, protects you from that.
Another use is relocation.
What I call relocation,
and that is that when you use a VPN service,
you are connecting to their server and it's their server that then makes
the outgoing connection to wherever it is you're trying to connect.
If that server happens to be
in a different country, then it looks like you're in a different country.
This is most commonly associated with streaming.
In other words, if there's an online video stream that you want to watch,
but it's in a different country and they actively take steps to prevent it
from being watched in your country, a VPN can sometimes help.
For example, Dutch television is not available in the United States live.
But if I use a VPN and make it look like I'm in the Netherlands,
then all of a sudden, yes, I can watch live stream Dutch TV, if I'm so inclined.
Now, the catch, of course, is that a lot of the online streaming
providers, specifically the Netflixes and the Hulus and the others along those
lines, they know people do this and they don't want them to.
So a lot of the time,
if they can detect that you are connecting through a VPN, they'll block your access.
They will prevent you from being able to go through.
But in many cases, like I said,
the case that I just had worked, and it worked fine.
The one caveat here is that the quality
of your VPN matters a lot, especially when it comes to video streaming.
Video, as you can imagine, is a high bandwidth, high data transfer operation.
If the VPN itself is slow and they all add
a little bit of slowness, but if it's too slow,
then your video experience will be starts and stops or breaks or whatever,
and not something that's really going to solve the problem for you.
So this is one of those cases where
understanding just how good a VPN you have is one of the ways to resolve the issue.
The third scenario related to the first, but I consider it to be different.
And that's what I call surveillance protection.
If you are in a country that has surveillance as part of the DayToday
operation by your government or big business or Internet service providers,
or whomever a VPN can and I have to say can potentially protect you.
Again, your government, your ISP,
or whomever will see that you're using a VPN, and they might infer you have
something to hide, but they won't be able to see what it is you're transmitting.
Now I have to throw in this huge caveat,
and that is that you're trusting the VPN service to do the right thing.
The problem, of course,
is that the government will be able to see you're using a VPN.
The VPN service can see everything you're doing.
The VPN service may be subject to the laws
of the country in which it is located, which may allow governments to request
access to whatever information the VPN has about your usage.
You may not be as protected as you think.
Remember, a VPN protects only your connection.
It actually doesn't protect what you do once you're connected.
So if you, for example, use a VPN to connect to an email service
and then log into that email service with your ID, you've just exposed who you
are, at least to the email service you had to.
But it's possible that sniffing
that happens after your information leaves the VPN service on its way to the email
provider could still be intercepted and looked at by third parties.
So it is one of those things where you
definitely need to understand the nuances of what's happening.
The good news is that I don't think most
people have to worry about surveillance, and if you do, you probably want a more
detailed set of instructions and articles that I can provide here.
The Eff.org is probably a good place
for you to start, but for most people, I end up recommending VPNs for road
warriors, for people who travel a lot, who are in a lot of different hotels,
who use a lot of different open WiFi hotspots.
It's a great way to provide that additional layer of security when you
don't know and don't trust of the Internet service that you're using.
Question
what do I use?
What VPN service should I use?
I have two that I'll talk about.
One is TunnelBear.
I've used Tunnel Bear for a fairly long time.
They're inexpensive, they're kind of fun.
They've solved the issue for me whenever
I've been traveling, and in a couple of cases where I've needed
a relocation, the one I'm using right now is Proton VPN.
Now Tunnel Bear is in Canada,
so of course they're going to be subject to Canadian laws.
Proton is in Switzerland, which is presumably a more secure set
of laws, a more private set of laws that Proton is actively working to make
sure that their customers are as secure and as safe as possible.
I ended up switching to Proton VPN only because I didn't need two.
I got Proton VPN as a package when I
signed up for ProtonMail a paid version of ProtonMail.
So why have two?
So I can easily recommend either
Tunnel Bear or Proton VPN, depending on your own situation.
Which one checks out best for you?
There are VPN providers to absolutely avoid, and those are free ones.
If you're not paying, you are the product, which means what you're doing is probably
being logged or monitored or collected or collated.
And we don't know to what level it may be in aggregate only, right?
It may be information that can't be used
ever to identify you as an individual, but you don't know.
You just don't know.
Like I said, those guys are making their money somehow.
The other thing is most of the free VPNs
don't have the performance that you really want for some of the things you do.
So I do recommend if this is something that's important to you.
There are lots of good VPN providers out there.
Definitely choose one that is a paid
service so that you have that extra level of comfort that you're not the product.
Now the question, of course, is do you really need a VPN?
And like I said,
if you're traveling a lot, then by all means, you should probably have one.
It's one of the reasons I have one.
I do travel, even with my mobile device
to a coffee shop or with my laptop on the road.
But if you're usually just at home and there's not a whole lot of traveling
going on and you trust your ISP and your government,
there's a strong argument that says you really don't need one at all.
It's kind of sort of up to you.
I'll leave it to you to decide.
But by and large, for example,
as I sit here right now at home, I'm not using a VPN and I don't feel
the need to you may feel differently and that's fine.
Hopefully this will give you a little bit
of guidance on what they're for, which ones to consider and which ones to avoid.
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