![]() They’ve released testing tools for VPN services, but only after making sure that their own services passed the tests. Turkish police took one of their servers once to peer into it. They’re based in the British Virgin Islands. I’ve no idea who they are, and more concerningly, nor do many people. The article my friend shared promotes ExpressVPN. But if you connect to a VPN, then the VPN company knows everything that you’ve done on the internet that day. If you work from home, the airport, a hotel room and a coffee shop in one day, then these various computer networks know relatively little about you. Any decent web browser, as long as you’ve kept it up to date, will spot when someone else is pretending to be your bank, and kick up a bunch of big red warning errors.) The other side of snooping In short, as long as you visit secure websites, you’re absolutely safe without a VPN. Visit your bank (or use their app on your mobile), and the only thing that anyone else on the network knows is that someone is visiting a bank’s website. They don’t know what page you’re visiting, what you’re typing, or anything else. They can see “” in your internet traffic: but everything else is encrypted. Visit Facebook (or any other website) now, and the only thing that anyone else on the network can do is to know that someone is visiting Facebook. Now, every decent website uses and things are quite different. Most websites at that time weren’t secure - so they started rather than http s:// - which means they weren’t encrypted and you could see everything that people were doing on them on the network. All I needed was you to visit that website once and login.īut things have changed. Worse than that, though: if you were looking through Facebook or Twitter, I could steal your login details and pretend to be you. It wouldn’t be a network otherwise.Ī long time ago, a piece of software called Firesheep let you look around what other users were doing on the network you were connected to. It’s not just co-working sites and coffee shops: every network lets you see other traffic on that network. “The fact is that most of those shared networks (co-working sites and coffee shops) are quite open to snooping” This author has just spent time and energy scaring you into purchasing something, then stands to benefit when you do so? That, alone, should lead you to questioning their claims. Not least, this article ends with an admission that the author gets a kick-back from the VPN company he’s recommending/scaring you into, for every new subscriber. ![]() This piece, like many others, is full of typical scary arguments for a VPN: without one, people can snoop what you’re doing, you’d be mad to do online banking without a VPN, you owe it to your clients to keep your communication safe, etc. Think they give you better security? Here are some reasons to think againĪs we all begin working from home, a friend shares a typical “ Why you need a VPN” piece to their Facebook page.
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