Few people know what VPNs are. And yet, you don’t have to be a computer expert or a computer genius to get the most out of these useful tools.
A VPN is a virtual private network – from English: virtual private network – through which Internet users can access the internet. In general, when you connect to the internet, you do so by sending certain information from a device, which can be a mobile phone, a tablet, a computer, a smartTV… to servers where the landing pages are hosted. In less than a second, an information exchange occurs.
On the other hand, when you connect to the internet through a VPN, the connection is not made directly, but before establishing the connection, our data is sent, encrypted and filtered through another server: the virtual private network. A small modification occurs in the path so that the level of browsing security is much higher than that experienced on a public network.
Advantages of accessing the internet through a VPN
A VPN server can achieve that you can access the internet completely anonymously, something that is enhanced if you use some type of cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin or ethereum, in your transactions and purchases. Intimacy and privacy are very precious assets that are worth preserving. And in the internet age, even if we are not aware of it, we are constantly leaving information about ourselves. So the more jealous we are of our intimacy, the better.
Regardless of whether you want to surf anonymously, you can prevent your internet provider from accessing your data. Your internet provider has a complete record of your browsing history, although it is true that it is private and no one should be able to access that history. Using a VPN is a good way to make it difficult to track your browsing data: what pages you visited, what keywords you enter in search engines, what time you connect, what documents, photos or files you have seen and / or downloaded and a long list of information.
It provides a different IP address than the real one of your device, which provides different advantages.
Lets skip locks. There are certain countries that limit browsing and access to certain pages and applications. The paradigmatic case can be found in China, which, among other pages, prohibits access to Facebook. In the hypothetical case that you are in China, you could access Facebook using a VPN that assigns you an IP address from another country. As in the case of China, it is applicable to any country, place and website on which there is some kind of limitation.
Protection against possible threats. Public networks are a very insecure point and the vulnerability of those who connect to the internet through them is very high. A large number of hackers and hackers take advantage of this weakness to carry out their cyberattacks.
Remote access to your office to telework. VPNs allow access to work networks remotely, without the need for a physical connection. This is a very important advantage to take into account after what happened with the coronavirus health crisis, in which thousands of workers have been forced to work from home, something that, on the other hand, has long been demanded by a large number of workers. Teleworking is a labor modality more in line with the present and allows for better family reconciliation and more efficient time management, two fields in which we still have to evolve a lot as a society.
It allows access to content available in countries other than the one where you are actually located. Audiovisual content platforms such as HBO or Netflix do not have the same catalog for all the countries in which they operate. Each country has its own series and movies; some coincide in different countries and others do not. By using a VPN you can change the location of your device – IP address – and take advantage to access new content: if you connect from a computer located in Spain, through a VPN you can get your IP address to be located, for example, in the U.S. If you access a platform like Netflix in this way, you will have at your disposal the offer that Netflix has in the United States and not in Spain. This is ideal for watching series or movies that do not appear in your country’s catalog and you don’t even know when they will arrive.
There are a large number of VPNs at your disposal. You can take a look on this website and compare some of the options that will broaden your experience as an internet user.
Lastly, although there are similarities between them, it is necessary to point out that a proxy and a VPN are not the same thing. You can access here to get information about what a proxy is and how it differs from a private virtual network.