Gone are the days when internet privacy was surfing the internet with your doors locked and no one watching you. The internet is becoming more open by the day. This has enabled hackers, ISP’s, services like google and Facebook to monitor all your activities from clicks to search queries. VPN is not the ultimate solution but It is no longer that VPN’s are meant for businesses and large organisations only. Anyone can use a VPN today and there are free and paid tools available.

What is this VPN?

VPN stands for virtual private network and connects two computers basically over the internet through a secure channel even though connected via insecure and public networks. It works on the client server architecture, where we are the VPN clients and we connect to what is a VPN server and by encryption and secure tunneling, no one can see what information is being exchanged. The information we are talking about is your web traffic, websites you request for, passwords, people you talk to online, usernames and even the IP addresses.

Generally in an Internet Model, you interact with a web server directly through the ISP and the IP address on the network that your ISP has allotted to you. This IP address can be easily traced back to you. What VPN does is that it acts as a middleman between the internet and you. So all the traffic first goes to your VPN Server and the VPN server requests for the website and automatically the IP address that reaches the internet as the computer requesting is of VPN server and not yours.

How are you going to feel if there were guys from Facebook, Google, Twitter and all these popular services along with a bunch of guys from the websites you visit, shoulder surfing standing at your back and seeing what all are you clicking and searching for. Creepy? Welcome to reality. Yes this is the reality and you are facing it now. Some server right now is logging all you are doing, even if in the incognito or the private browsing mode.

Why should you use a VPN?

Whatever work you are doing today, you are vulnerable to being hacked . You still need to be secure and protected from the illicit activities of the hackers or simple logging by websites and web servers. There are so many basic vulnerabilities that you can protect yourself from just by using a VPN.

Here’s a list of why you should be using a VPN:

You are concerned about your online privacy, what information goes online to websites and to your ISP.

You are concerned about your online security and want that your usernames don’t get stolen or preyed at.

You don’t want to give away your location with your IP addresses to protect your identity

You don’t want search engines to record all your searches and your sessions.

You use WiFi hotspots, public WiFi at hotels and your hostels etc.

You want to access services that are only accessible in the US, UK or some other countries.(Netflix, BBC etc.)

Now how do you get a VPN?

As far as privacy goes, there is no law yet about it in India. So particularly asking to surf the internet privately is not a right to the citizens. VPN Services in india landed us to only services that can let you pay in dollars, so they are not based out of here. Vodafone has VPN solutions for businesses going but as far as we believe it is restricted to the company files and database and internal networks. There are the paid versions and then the free ones as well. The choice of a service depends on you. Here is a list that we found to be pretty much to the point.

You can read more on this from our friends at Cyber Cops here: Best VPNs in India in 2020