If you’ve landed on this page, there’s a good chance that you’re looking for a VPN, or virtual private network. Perhaps someone recommended a certain product or service, or an advert caught your curiosity? You might be privacy-minded, or simply want to stay private online in an ever-changing world.
Before you take the plunge into unfamiliar waters, we’re here to tell you that you might not actually need a VPN after all.
VPNs today make a lot of promises, from defending your privacy from surveillance to improving your internet speeds and protecting against malicious online threats. In simple terms, VPN providers funnel all of your device’s internet traffic through their own systems, under the premise that the provider shields your information from outside prying eyes, like governments, online advertisers, and even your home internet provider.
The problem is, how do you trust that a VPN provider will protect all of your private internet browsing information? The simple answer is that you can’t and shouldn’t trust either free or paid VPN providers. As TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet says in our explainer of what VPNs are and what they do, VPNs are only helpful in a handful of situations. For some, using a VPN can be as dangerous as not using one.
There is good news! The simple flowchart below can help you decide if you need a VPN for your situation, or if there are better options for what you’re looking for.
In the cases where you might need a VPN, the best VPN provider is one that you have made yourself. We have a simple guide on how to set up your own encrypted VPN server, including with open source software that’s been reviewed and audited by security professionals.
And, if you don’t think you need a VPN, we look at the privacy tools and the other measures you can take to improve your privacy online.
Let’s go!
If you live in a part of the world where a government or authority is restricting access to the internet or blocking certain websites, it’s likely that you’re subject to censorship. This means that the government may also have the ability to monitor the regional internet traffic and decide which websites and services you can and cannot access.
In cases where certain websites are blocked, a VPN could allow you to access a website as though you were coming from another part of the world entirely, wherever that VPN server is located. But governments are known to block the IP address ranges that VPN providers use, rendering the VPN ineffective or unusable.
To bypass censorship, it’s far better to use Tor, a network service that encrypts, scrambles, and anonymizes internet traffic through multiple different proxy servers as you browse the web. Because your encrypted internet traffic continuously travels through different servers to ensure anonymity, the Tor Network is typically slower to browse than the regular internet, but it’s capable of evading regional internet censorship.
Regardless of whether or not you’re subject to censorship, you may simply want to browse the web anonymously without anyone knowing that it’s you.
Browsing the web leaves a lot of digital footsteps behind you. Websites know that you’ve visited them thanks to the army of ad trackers planted on each web page (and tell other sites what you’re looking at, too). Your internet provider, which routes your browsing data over the internet, might be collecting information about your browsing habits, storing it for an unspecified amount of time, and monetizing it.
And your government can seek grounds to demand access to your browsing data anytime it wants — including retroactively — which can also include demands to access data from VPN providers, defeating the very point of the privacy you sought.
You can avoid online surveillance by not leaving behind a trace of personal information to begin with. We recommend browsing the web using Tor for anonymity, as Tor routes your internet traffic through multiple servers around the world to ensure that no one server can see your browsing data. As such, Tor can be slower to load than the regular internet, all the while still providing top-notch privacy benefits.
Security experts consider the Tor network the gold standard of private browsing because it allows you to access the internet without censorship or surveillance.
Instead of relying on a single tunnel to hide your internet traffic, Tor works by encrypting and routing users’ internet traffic through thousands of servers around the world, shielding their activity from other servers and the outside world. Because of Tor’s implementation, no single Tor server can see your browsing data. That means even if a Tor server is compromised, the attacker still cannot access the users’ browsing data within.
Because Tor is open source, anyone can inspect its source code to ensure that it’s safe to run. Tor is also free, so anyone can use it across a variety of platforms and devices.
In practice, accessing Tor can be as simple as downloading and running the Tor Browser, a custom-made version of Firefox, in which anything that happens in that browser window privately routes over the Tor network. Some advanced users may choose to route more of their internet traffic or data from specific apps over the Tor network.
The Tor Browser, maintained by the nonprofit Tor Project, also blocks and isolates ad trackers and prevents websites from “fingerprinting” your device, which can be used to uniquely identify and track which websites your specific device visits as you travel around the web.
With Tor, know its limitations. Because it’s designed with privacy and anti-surveillance in mind, it generally runs slower than the regular internet and is not designed for content streaming. Some governments and authorities try to block Tor traffic. Tor includes various in-built “bridges” that can disguise Tor’s traffic to make it blend in with regular internet traffic, making it more difficult for governments and authorities to block.
Geoblocking (or “geographical blocking”) can prevent you from accessing websites, video games locked to a specific geographical region, or online streaming services, such as watching a television program while you’re overseas.
This can be due to licensing restrictions on the content providers, or because some websites are unable to meet the legal obligations that some regional authorities require, such as in the European Union.
A VPN can help bypass geoblocking restrictions, but know the limitations.
VPNs were originally designed to allow users to “virtually” access their office network from anywhere else in the world. To this day, using a VPN to remotely access another computer or network is still a common and fairly typical use of a VPN.
If you work from home, you might use a VPN provided by your workplace for accessing your email or other web-based work applications when not in the office. It’s this secure private tunnel that lets you use a computer as if you were physically at the office. If you use a VPN for work, it will be provided to you — you won’t need to make one.
One possible use case for a VPN is so that you can access your home network from anywhere in the world. For most people, this is not necessary and could increase your risk of outsiders accessing your home network if your VPN were ever compromised.
And, developers might want to use a VPN to access another system that’s hosted in a data center, or use a VPN to connect systems together even if they are located in entirely different regions.
A VPN can be helpful in bypassing restrictions accessing content hosted in another region, known as geoblocking. Geoblocks can restrict access to certain online videos, games, or entire websites.
Using a VPN server that is hosted in a region where the content is located can sometimes allow access to the content as though you were physically located there. VPNs set up using modern infrastructure, like a data center or a cloud host, can usually handle a large amount of bandwidth and are unlikely to slow down your internet speeds or degrade the quality of your browsing, gaming, or content streaming.
It’s worth noting that some content providers are increasingly blocking access to devices that they cannot be sure are located in the region they claim to be, such as users they suspect are using a VPN. Some providers block the IP address ranges of some VPN providers altogether, rendering the VPN ineffective.
There is no guarantee that a VPN will work in every case. But the best VPN is one that you set up, as you can often set it up in the region of your choice and under your control.
If you have one or more systems that you want to be able to remotely access at any time, a VPN might be what you need. A VPN allows you to virtually access that system from anywhere in the world. That may be a system in a data center or a cloud host for storing your files, or a home computer at another property, or an office location that you own.
It’s worth noting that even with the most secure technology, no product, service, or software is free from security flaws. As such, setting up a VPN at home nevertheless increases the chance that it may be maliciously exploited by someone on the internet.
The best VPN is a VPN server that you set up so that you can configure and secure it, and control it yourself.
Updated on November 15, 2024.
