Jim Rossman: Should you use a VPN all the time?

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This week’s reader question is about VPN: ”I have used VPN in the past provided by my university, but that was just for overseas access from China. Since retiring, I no longer have access to that service. Considering the way we are being tracked these days, is a private subscription worth it? Any downsides? I'd appreciate your opinion.”

Great question.

First, let’s discuss VPN and why you’d want to use it.

VPN stands for virtual private network, which is an added layer of security for your internet connection, both at home and on the road.

You certainly want to keep your internet traffic out of the prying eyes of hackers, but what about other entities that can see (and track) your online activities, like your internet service provider, advertisers, your browser manufacturer and websites you visit?

They can (and do) collect as much data about your internet activity as they can. Using a VPN is something you can do to minimize that tracking.

Consumer VPN is software that encrypts all your incoming and outgoing internet traffic through a secured server. It is a very secure way to surf the internet, but it can slow things down.

You may have used a business VPN at work. At the university where I work, we use VPN to make secure connections inside our network from the outside world. I have to connect to the university VPN system to access the servers and computers on our network if I’m working from home.

If you start researching VPN, you’ll find some are free and some charge a monthly or annual subscription.

I don’t think I’d trust my personal information to a free VPN. I don’t have a specific subscription VPN to recommend. You’ll need to do some research.

There are other reasons to use a VPN. One of the features offered by most better VPN services is to mask a user’s location.

When you use the VPN service, you can connect to a server in a city in another area of the U.S or other part of the world. This is useful if you subscribe to a service like NFL Sunday Ticket or MLB.TV and want to watch games that might normally be blacked out in your area.

Also, streaming services like Netflix offer different content in other countries. You can explore those offerings by connecting to a VPN server in those countries. I’m not advocating using VPN to circumvent any subscriber agreements you may have with your streaming services, but it does happen.

As to whether you need to use one and should you use it all the time? You might want to, but I don’t use a VPN at home. I think my home network is secure enough and I disable tracking as much as I can.

The places I’d be most tempted to use VPN would be on public Wi-Fi networks, and I stopped using public Wi-Fi when I started using my phone’s hotspot connection when I need to get online from outside my house.

Some people like more security, and that’s not a bad thing. If you told me you always use a VPN and you’re happy, then I’m happy.

You might want to try one and see how you like it.