VPN - What They Are, How They Work, and Why to Use Them

You've heard a lot about it, but what is a VPN? How does it work? Why should you need it? Find out everything with this complete guide 

Are you afraid that someone might spy on your online activity? Would you like to access the Netflix world catalog so as not to miss a single show? Don't want your internet provider to know you are torrenting or streaming movies? Whether it's online security, digital entertainment, or privacy, the answer to these three questions is always and only one: VPN.

You have almost certainly heard the term VPN before, from work colleagues, friends, or even simply advertised on the internet, especially if you happen to watch movies and series in streaming or if you regularly use torrent sites. But VPNs can be used for many different reasons, primarily to ensure your privacy on the internet, because today we can hardly talk about online security without mentioning this technology.

In this article, we will briefly see what VPNs are and how they work, and therefore why use them in the three main areas we referred to at the beginning, namely security, privacy, and entertainment. Do you already know what they are and would you like to know more? Check out this article that debunks common misconceptions about VPNs!

What a VPN is and how it works

The acronym VPN stands for Virtual Private Network or virtual private network. The network in question is private as it is accessible only to authorized users and virtual as it is located on the internet and not necessarily wired or connected by physical means (such as the home network). Using tunneling protocols, the VPN allows both to hide your online activity and to mask your IP address from which you access the Internet, resulting for example connected from another country.

How does this technology translate to the average user? In practice, when we browse the internet and, for example, click on a link or try to access a website, our computer, through the internet provider (i.e. Fastweb, Vodafone, TIM, etc ...), it forwards a request to the server on which the page we are trying to access resides. The server then responds to our request, returning the page content. In this case, therefore, our provider sees which site we are connecting to and the site sees that we are connecting, receiving various identification data along with our request. By inserting the VPN in the midst of this dynamic, the path changes. In fact, by connecting to a VPN, our computer, always through the internet provider, connects to the virtual private network in question and it will then be this private network to forward our request to the site we want to view. The site itself will only see the data of the VPN and not of our computer or our provider, which in turn will not be able to see which site we are connecting to.

As you will have understood then, using a VPN, Fastweb, TIM, Vodafone or anyone will only see that we are connected to the service, without being able to "see" the data we send and are sent to us. We could talk for hours and hours about how this technology works, but in a nutshell, that's it. So let's see why using a virtual private network and how it can help us.

VPN for online security

This is certainly one of the most popular uses for VPNs, so much so that more and more antivirus and online security suites offer some form of VPN, albeit usually to a limited extent (for example with predefined data traffic per day or per month). If you're not sure how a VPN improves your security while browsing the internet, think about how many times you've connected to public Wi-Fi networks. When you connect to a public line, not only do you not know who else can be connected with you, you do not even know what the intentions or data control policies of the network operator maybe. The line could be controlled by a hacker, who monitors traffic on the network by spying on connected computers looking for private information, such as login credentials for online banking sites, credit cards, and more. Using a Virtual Private Network, however, all your traffic will be encrypted, so even if someone were to manage to intercept your data, they would be unusable.

Hiding your data from the prying eyes of hackers or other entities is not the only reason to use VPNs for online security, but given the nature of others, let's move on to the next category of using virtual private networks, certainly closely related to this one.

VPN to protect your privacy on the Internet

VPN is essentially the only way to bypass online government censorship, as data transmitted over the private network is encrypted and communications or searches cannot be intercepted or filtered.

It must also be said that you don't need to go to the extreme of oppressive censorship to want to hide your internet traffic. Some providers in fact record information on the use we make of our connection to resell them later. Furthermore, some managers do not allow the use of torrents, as they are practically identified as a method of spreading piracy, even if not all torrents necessarily concern illegal content. With a VPN, you can download torrents privately and without any problems.

Finally, by reconnecting also to the first point of online security, since connections through virtual private networks are encrypted, even the communications we make while connected to a VPN remain protected and inaccessible. It's true that many apps now have built-in encryption, but do you want someone else to hear that voice or see the last photo you sent?

VPN is not enough to protect your data from the online vulnerability. Find the best free antivirus software to prevent the online threat