I see a lot of VPN marketing on YouTube and all the influencer videos etc, and I am wondering if VPN really keeps our information safe or is it a marketing tactic to exploit users who don’t know how internet work?
I see a lot of VPN marketing on YouTube and all the influencer videos etc, and I am wondering if VPN really keeps our information safe or is it a marketing tactic to exploit users who don’t know how internet work?
Comments
nope, not really. it just sends your info somewhere else
It really depends on what you mean by “keep your information safe”.
VPNs hide the location that your internet traffic is coming from. So, if you live in California, to the website, it will look like you are connecting from India or something.
But that’s the extent of what a VPN does. If you are foolish about how you use a website, that doesn’t help you at all.
not inherently. most VPN vendors are peddling snake oil. they have their place, but for the random personal schmoe? no.
Meh, if I tell you something and you tell your brother something or 2nd cousin something, is it really safe?
Overall better but not to much more. Just scrambled.
i knew a few people involved with a vpn. The admins of the vpn can see what you’re viewing, they don’t record logs but if you are a personal friend of theirs on porn sites they could contact you and laugh at you, they’d know. It was suppose to be safe from hackers and isps knowing/getting your ip number . as far as i know its safe.
No.
Wow a lot of these comments are incorrect. A VPN (virtual private network) disguises your IP address by routing through an encrypted path to a server somewhere else. This makes your connection look as though it is coming from the server you are routing through rather than your actual connection and IP address. It was actually invented by the US navy but quickly became a tool for criminal and security use by the public. A proper VPN will make it extremely hard or impossible for law enforcement to pinpoint your location or access your data when used properly. After all silk road was protected by VPN and it was Ross Ulbricht’s human errors that got him caught.
vpn is akin to putting a letter inside another letter and posting it to someone else, who opens the outer letter – reads the address of the letter inside and posts it to that address. The intermediary knows where you posted the letter from (your ip address) and knows where you want the inner letter posted to. (aka the metadata)
In theory the contents of the inner letter are unread by the intermediary (because it’s encrypted) – but somebody with the money or time could make a copy of that letter long after they have posted for you and they have all the time they need to open (decrypt) the copy without you knowing
if i was a government agency and wanted shady people to send me all their letters for onward posting – all i would need to do is setup a free letter forwarding business and sit back and wait for the mail to arrive – simple eh.
I trust VPNs they absolutely works fine, you can check your live IP while using VPNs
If the VPN is properly encrypted it hides the traffic from your ISP and any other who might be snooping along the way. This makes it a usefull tool if you wanna use public wifi where someone could more easily snoop on your activity. The other privacy advantage is that it obscures your real location to the server you connect to (ie. the website you visit or the service you use) and instead only shows the location of the VPN providers server. BUT, and here’s the important thing, it does not protect you in any way from the one’s providing the VPN service! You are willingly sharing all your activity with them, and they can easily snoop on your traffic at their server. So ONLY use a VPN service that has been vetted by third parties and that you can trust and actually pay for. Never use any free service. Since they also need to make money, guess in what way you’re paying. That’s right – your data.
VPN keep your IP safe. Protecting your information is done through encrypted Internet traffic between your PC and the destination server, not the VPN.
VPN will also be utterly useless when used on services which use kyc techniques.
VPN however are great for bypassing geo restrictions, and using Internet services you don’t want traced back to yourself.
as someone thats involved in the proxy business, yes they do…. just dont use fake vpns that are super cheap… some free ones are much better like proton. if you ever join networks that aren’t you’re such as work, public hot spots, airplanes, trains etc make sure you always use a vpn… if youre in Switzerland,Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands or canada you may have noticed the free wifi points that your phone automatically connects to when nearby theres an advisory to use a vpn when you start the service
Mmm from my understanding of VPNs. It just masks your data from the point of origin.
From my understanding. It’s like having a server you connect to. If I have a computer in Alaska. And I’m currently in China. And I want to access google.
So I would connect to my personal computer in Alaska and then use it to connect to google then have it send the data back to my computer in China.
So technically, it is just a bypass. If someone wanted to look they could. It’s so the ISP doesn’t register it as “google” or whatever.
Fyi: my knowledge is probably outdated. I used this back 15 years ago? Exchange student from Canada to China. Think the general method is the same.
If by information you mean where you connect and your browsing history then yes some of them keep your information safe. Those are the VPN services who don’t record/save any user logs.
Pretty much every single VPN should also protect you from various Phishing/MITM attacks when using public wifi and the attacks are setup for that specific public wifi, lets say if someone compromises Reddit or Facebook or any other website you visit then VPN won’t help.
One of those reputable “No Log” VPN’s would be Mullvad VPN.
Privacy on the internet is complicated and there isn’t any singular solution for it. VPNs are just one aspect of protecting your information nothing more.
VPNs provide an encrypted tunnel between you and the vpn providers server which then gets routed to whatever you are connecting to. This makes it so your isp and any other third parties cannot see your traffic. The vpn provider can see your traffic since your connecting to their server but more reputable vpn providers have no log policies.
As for actually keeping your information safe they do help in scenarios where your sharing wifi with someone potentially watching the traffic on the connection (public wifi).
Also keep in mind if you’re trying to use a VPN to hide your activity, just know that the moment you sign into a service via that VPN, you’re announcing yourself.
Defence requires knowing who you are defending from.
VPNs between two private networks are pretty solid. The original purpose was to establish a trusted private link over an untrusted network.
Your commercial VPNs terminate inside the Internet, the untrusted network so aren’t as secure. But if you expect to be monitored at your end then a VPN to get past that is useful. E.g. I know my ISP is logging the fact I’m on Reddit right now. A VPN would protect from that.
The Reddit connection is inside an SSL tunnel but my ISP will also MITM that so they can see what subs I’m looking at if they want to. The only instance I know of that happening was with Wikipedia when the whole of the UK got IP banned one time.
A VPN can’t stop you typing your passport number into a scam website.
The geolocating feature is pretty good. I’m learning Swedish and I’ve used a VPN to access Swedish content.
Some of them don’t even advertise safety anymore, they just tell you you can watch shows from Germany and other countries.
Really research the VPN company, a lot are owned by untrustworthy parties who are banking on ppl not researching so they have access to your data for surveillance
Depends what you mean by safe. Generally speaking it shines when using public wifi, but besides that I wouldn’t mark it as a safety measure.
They’re basically a proxy. If you trust the VPN provider then yeah, your ISP not knowing what you’re doing and websites not knowing where you are from is a benefit, though aside from the usual HTTPS encryption (which is also “military grade” as these companies love to tout) all of the information ive just mentioned is readily available to the VPN provider.
Information security specialist here. That protection is overblown and misleading.
What a VPN does, is it sets up an encrypted tunnel for your internet traffic to the VPN provider’s servers, where it continues unobstructed to its destination. So it protects the first part of the journey to some degree, at the cost of you having to put your trust in the VPN provider instead. It offers some theoretical protection from unsecured wifi networks, but I’d argue that it’s probably better to use a mobile hotspot rather than relying on a VPN. It also theoretically hides information from your ISP, but it gives that data to your VPN provider instead, so yeah…
It doesn’t protect the data at all once it arrives at its destination. By far most data leaks happen because of a company leaking your data, not because a clever hacker intercepted your traffic.
It also isn’t a surefire way of protecting your identity. Browser fingerprinting is the method of uniquely identifying users based on small configuration differences in browsers, and browser fingerprinting is often good enough to narrow it down significantly. But most people just stay logged into their socials anyways, so any website you visit would easily be able to learn your identity that way. Ever seen a Facebook like button? Yeah, that means the website knows who you are.
Also, protection against malware is something that VPNs sometimes taut. That’s not something inherent in VPNs and definitely not a foolproof protection. Quad9 as DNS does something similar and is completely free.
Keeping your device updated and being aware on the internet does a lot more. For the general public, VPNs for security are snake oil.
Just use nextDNS.
Until you do something illegal, not really.
It’s handy for getting around geo-ip blocks.