Should you use a VPN to protect your privacy ?

Data Privacy adaptation is once again upon us and has always been important. It’s why people put locks on filing cabinets and rent safety deposit boxes at their banks. But as more of our data becomes digitized, and we share more information online, data privacy is taking on greater importance. A single company may possess the personal information of millions of customers data that it needs to keep private so that customers’ identities stay as safe and protected as possible, and the company’s reputation remains untarnished. But data privacy isn’t just a business concern. 

VPN stands for virtual private network. It's basically a bunch of computers that share various resources privately. The "virtual" bit is where things get a little more complicated. In coming days most of the services providers are going to implement Hybrid or could computing system and also putting forward a VPN service to bring up high end encryption and security.

The best VPN providers boast of top-level encryption and security protocols that are meant to give you privacy on the Internet, or even make you anonymous. 

But is that true?

VPNs are supposed to secure your traffic by sending it through an encrypted tunnel and give you a different IP address so that your true IP address is not revealed to the websites and services you are connecting to. Your VPN provider can still see everything i.e. all you traffic, logs, devices, browser history. Absolutely all that prevents your VPN provider from abusing this information against you is their promise. Virtual private networks offer privacy by policy, not privacy by design, that is nothing technologically prevents your VPN from monitoring your traffic and do with that whatever they want - sell it, throttle it, or censor it. 

No VPN service is anonymous. Most of them require your email address upon sign-up and most payment methods will reveal your identity directly, unless they accept cryptocurrency, which is only pseudonymous, or cash, which can be truly anonymous. But cash is very rarely accepted, and even then your VPN provider always knows your real IP address. So yes, they change your IP address, by they are also your single point of failure. So if the server or the whole VPN is compromised, all traffic leads directly to your IP address and your devices.

When you connect to a VPN, all the data that gets sent from your device to the private network at the other end is "encapsulated." Each packet of data gets put inside another packet - think putting a letter into an envelope to keep its contents from being read during transport. The envelope could still be opened, though. That's why organizations like the CIA put tamper-proof tape over the flap. With a VPN connection, encryption is the tamper-proof tape. Some VPNs use SSL for encryption (just like secure websites do). Others might use IPSec or PPTP. The end result is a sort of network-within-a-network, but because of encapsulation and encryption your connection to a VPN remains private even though the data you're transmitting is moving over the very public Internet.

A VPN can actually keep your ISP (and cybercriminals and would-be eavesdroppers) in the dark about what you're doing. A VPN redirects your internet traffic, disguising where your computer, phone or other device is when it makes contact with websites. It also encrypts information you send across the internet, making it unreadable to anyone who intercepts your traffic. That includes your internet service provider.

The VPN has your internet traffic and browsing history, instead of your ISP. How to stop the VPN from selling your information to the highest bidder?

Well, in 2018 according to a blog post, a group of security coders discovered that free VPN service provider, Hola was selling its users' bandwidth to the paying customers of its Luminati service. That meant some random person could have been using your internet connection to do something illegal. So, it is shady like that.

The second catch is that you have to set up the VPN on your own, on all your devices that connect to the internet. You might even need different VPN services for different devices. Then you have to make sure you're connecting through a VPN at all times. How big a catch is depends on how tech-savvy you are and how much time you have in your hands.

Plenty of VPN users don't flip on the service unless they want to protect specific browsing sessions.

There are other benefits to using a VPN too, but anonymity is not one of them. Using a VPN enhances your privacy and security, but you should never assume that your activity couldn't be traced back to you if someone really, really wanted to do it.