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VPN – When would I need one?

The past few years have seen significant increase in promotion of VPN services, especially sponsoring creators on social media. Anyone watching YouTube will have encountered these ad segments by Surfshark, NordVPN or Private Internet Access.

However, you won’t see us promoting their use? Why is that? When should you use one?

What is a VPN?

A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. Traditionally, these were used by business users to connect remotely into a corporate network when working remotely, but more recently these have become services marketed to consumers to protect their privacy, hide their locations/identities, or secure their connections.

One of the key marketing claims of a VPN are to protect you from surveillance by your ISP. Whilst it is true that a VPN does limit your broadband provider’s ability to monitor your activity, the key issue is that it simply shifts this trust from your broadband provider, to the VPN provider. What you have to also consider is that a VPN provider may be subject to legislation in other jurisdictions, although many equally market this as an advantage. Nevertheless, you are ultimately trusting someone.

Here’s a diagram that shows how your connection to a website is routed and the IP seen by the web server:

A VPN established a tunnel between your computer and a VPN provider, typically encrypting and tunneling all the traffic to the VPN provider. This means your broadband provider only sees you connecting to a VPN provider, and your VPN provider will then route your traffic to any websites or application providers you’re using.

With no VPN, your provider sees the IP address (and possibly the DNS hostname) of the website you’re connecting to sees the IP address issued by your ISP. With a VPN, your ISP just sees you connecting to the VPN provider, and the website sees the VPN providers’s IP. Your VPN provider however both sees your real IP address, and the one of the website you’re visiting. Also, since you pay them, your identity willi also be known to them.

If you’re thinking of doing something dodgy though, do make sure your VPN doesn’t leak information, which some may do (e.g. if it doesn’t cover DNS resolution)

But isn’t HTTPS secure already?

Yes – The simple answer is when you visit a website beginning with ‘https://’ (which is pretty much most of the Internet), you are connecting to the web server over an encrypted connection. It is likely that your ISP won’t see the specific domain you’re connecting to, although they would be able to see the IP address of the server, and large websites may have dedicated IP addresses. They wouldn’t see whch pages on a site you visit. i.e. they would know you’re using Google, possibly that you’re searching or using Google Apps/e-mail, but not who your’re e-mailing or what you’re searching for. They could possibly get the website domain names from DNS logging, but again this would tell then you’re looking at “thinkbroadband.com”, not that you’ve say rated the provider. They may know who you bank with, but not how much money is in your account.

Remember, if you use a VPN provider, you’re hiding this from your ISP, but trusting your VPN provider with that information instead. Also, your bank might have some suspicions about you making payments and appearing to come from a VPN due to the abuse of these services by criminals. (e.g. many of the romance scammers in Africa are using VPNs to ‘appear’ to be in the U.S. or other countries they are targeting when signing up to dating sites).

What are VPNs marketed to be used for?

There are various use cases, however they broadly come under the following:

  • Protect your privacy — You can hide some traffic from your broadband provider/ISP. It’s probably the most mis-understood use case which really isn’t an issue for most people.
  • Avoid Proving your Identity to third parties (Online Safety Act) — The Online Safety Act requires you to prove you’re an adult to access some types of content. If you don’t wish to share your identity details with third parties unnecessarily (due to major privacy risks) to access these, you could use a VPN server located outside the UK to avoid this. This may not protect you from being identified with sufficient effort by law enforcement so it isn’t something you should be doing anything illegal with, but it likely reduces the risk of your name being associated with specific websites you visit.
  • Secure your connection — Probably the most useful use case; if you’re on a public Wi-Fi connection and browsing to an insecure (http:// not https://) website then your data is completely unencrypted and possible for anyone (not just the broadband provider) to intercept. Having a VPN when using Wi-Fi at a coffee shop may be very semsible
  • Evade Geo-blocking — Many services restrict their use to certain countries, often to comply with licensing requirements. This means you might be able to get a better deal on some software if they think you’re from a poorer country, or you may be able to avoid some content limitations on streaming services, however these can be hit and miss. The Honest Guides from Prague identified that the cycle sharing scheme in Paris doesn’t work if you’re using a mobile connection on a non-French number, but using Surfshark VPN the app works fine. This is probably the most common use case for many users. See the video below.
  • Speed up your connection — Whilst it’s true some ISPs used to filter/throttle some services, this just isn’t a think these days. If your VPN connection speeds your your service to a particular site, it’s probably an isolated side effect of congestion somewhere, rather than a specific issue you’re addressing. We covered this in our Virgin Media throttling connections of heavy users article. (No, they don’t). The reality is a VPN is more likely to reduce your speed as it needs to go through additional servers on the way to the real server.
  • Protect you from malware — A VPN on its own does not protect you from malware. Some VPN providers may bundle in other security solutions but you could buy anti-malware tools separately. This isn’t a VPN thing.

The video showing how to use a VPN to get access to bike rental in France (due to bad management of the Paris cycle scheme’s web services):

Many VPN providers proclaim their “no logs” policy but don’t assume that it’s not possible at government level to correlated traffic (or even hack VPN providers, or force them to comply despite their public claims). In the end, VPNs have a role for many, but it’s not as big as they make it out to be. 

True anonymity

If you’d like to be truly anonymous on the Internet the Tor network (standing for The Onion Router) is a more robust solution, although you may be limited in accessing some resources due to abuse of the Tor network (as indeed can happen with VPNs). This technology is what is often referred to as ‘the dark net’ which enabled anonymous access to resources which may be of nefarious reputation, but equally has many privacy protections for legitimate use.

When should you use a VPN?

When you’re on an ‘untrusted’ connection (i.e. public Wi-Fi) generally. Whilst the key is if you want to visit websites which aren’t protected by SSL/TLS enceyption (https://), there are edge cases where DNS poisoning has been used with insecure update mechanisms in some software to hack into systems. If you’re technically minded then this video by Seytonic explains how this works.

So in summary, yes use a VPN when you’re on public Wi-Fi, but we wouldn’t worry about it from home.

Which VPN Service would you recommend?

We haven’t reviewed VPN services, so at this time we can’t provide specific recommendations.