 Tuesday, April 16, 2019 in Security  6 Comments |  | In a world full of privacy concerns, many people turn to Virtual Private Networks to hide their IP, avoid being tracked, and hide ads. Ironically, many free VPN services can do precisely the opposite.
What is a VPN?
When you connect to the internet, you're assigned an IP address. This IP address identifies you and your location. A VPN routes your internet traffic through a server first, thereby making you appear to be someone else, from somewhere else.
Using Free VPN Services
We should first address our headline where we slipped in the word "Mostly." There are many free VPN services, but they use a third-party server list that's freely available on the internet. They have no control over who runs these servers and what they're doing when your traffic routes through them.
If you connect to a malicious VPN server, your traffic could be monitored exposing a lot of information on your computer. You might also see ads or be exposed to malware designed to get your credit card information, deliver ransomware, and more. You don't want to use a free VPN that isn't updated regularly. While there's no guarantee, any good freeware VPN will update their lists as needed.
Some free VPN services are upfront and honest about where your traffic goes. Let's use ChrisPC Free VPN Connection as an example.
When you connect to a VPN, ChrisC, a reputable company, warns you that they're using free VPN services and that you should look up the VPN before using them.
We did precisely this with the first VPN (vpnbook.com), and they're reviews were good, and they appear to be a trusted, well-established company. We love ChrisPC's honesty.
Using Paid VPN Services
Paid VPN services, in theory, take the risk out of using third-party servers by providing private servers. These companies rely on their reputation to sell their product and provide the privacy you expect. Many of these VPN services offer a "Freemium" app allowing you to test their product first, often with a cap on how much traffic you can use.
For this example, we will look at TunnelBear.
While TunnelBear is called freemium, it's a bandwidth limited demo that requires email registration. Checking on reviews finds many people say it isn't as fast as some of the competition yet TunnelBear remains popular.
In Conclusion
The recurring theme here is that it's all about the servers a VPN uses, free or paid. Using free servers adds potential risk, and paid servers require some research to find who provides the fastest servers.
Because all VPN servers route your traffic through additional servers, you can expect the internet to be slower. Because of this, your VPN choice of servers should be a major factor in your decision.
majorgeeks.com | |
|
