VPN stands for Virtual Private Network – a virtual private network. It is virtual because it does not physically belong to a person, and it is private because of the limited number of people who have access to the network. The main task is to give the opportunity to secure personal data, while remaining anonymous.
Today, VPN service are represented by standalone applications for mobile devices and PCs, as well as extensions for browsers. Experts highlight several reasons why VPN services are used by ordinary people: to provide reliable data protection (information will become available only if you have an encryption key), to bypass local restrictions on applications (LinkedIn, Facebook*, Twitter, Instagram* and others), anonymization by replacing the current geolocation by giving the IP address of the virtual network instead of the real one. In this case, the site will appear as if the visitor is in the country where the service server is located.
It is important to know that working in a public or home Wi-Fi network, there is a risk of interception of traffic in pure form by intruders: they can find out what services were used, what sites were visited and at what time. VPN, on the other hand, hides all this information, leaving crooks with bare hands.
Unfortunately, customer data of VPN services is not always safe and is freely accessible or sold to third parties. Sometimes this happens as a result of hacker attacks, but more often the information is deliberately sold or leaked. The reason: most services, especially free ones, completely record all logs, contrary to loud speeches about “security” and “privacy”.
In 2020, it became known that more than 1 TB of logs from several free VPN services could be found on the Internet. They contained IP addresses, passwords, device models and more. And it was all in unencrypted form.
Another couple of famous cases – the Hotspot Shield VPN service was not shy about collecting logs, including cookies. All the information was sold to third parties, such as advertisers. Another high-profile data privacy scandal was the news that the Meta Onavo Protect VPN and Facebook* Research VPN projects stored all customer activity on their servers. The projects were shut down in 2018 – 2019.
Of course, not everyone does this on purpose and sells information to third parties. More often than not, free services suffer in this way, with the only way to make money is through advertising. Companies providing services for money are doing much better in this regard – part of their budget is also spent on protecting user data.
Both free and paid programs can be found on the Internet. The first option is used by those who want to get acquainted with the technology, “feel” it and decide whether it is necessary or not. The second one is preferred by Internet visitors who care about data security, because in this case the risk of information leakage or hacking by fraudsters is very low, and the quality of services is several times higher.
There’s no doubt that a VPN is a great way to be anonymous on the Internet, especially when working on public Wi-Fi networks.
