How Do VPN Services Protect Data?

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are extremely popular all around the globe for one extremely important reason: privacy. Privacy is an increasingly scarce thing in the modern networked world. Malicious hackers or government organizations frequently target individual computers by surveilling them.

Although governments have come under all sorts of pressure to stop covert surveillance, there is no real way to hold them accountable for snooping operations that they do not wish to disclose in the name of national security. Likewise, hackers are extremely inventive and it is very unlikely that they will ever be completely deterred. VPNs offer people a glimmer of hope that some of their privacy online can be maintained. How, then, do VPNs protect data? This article takes a close look.

Your Location Is Your Identity

Your IP address holds the key to all sorts of identifying information about you. It can tell malicious actors who you are, where you live and how to search for your purchase history or data trail. Hiding your IP address is the key function of a VPN. VPN service providers have servers scattered all around the globe. This allows your internet to be routed through a remote server, which creates a new IP address that you will appear to be browsing from to the observer.

This makes it much harder to get a read on just who and where you are. This is just the basics of how a VPN works, and you can learn more about it here to fully get to grips with this increasingly vital piece of web security. Your location is your identity – protect it at all costs!

Encryption 

Encryption is a crucial part of a good VPN service. To put it simply, encryption is the process of jumbling up data and then reforming it when it has reached an authorized destination. If the wrong people get ahold of your data, it will only be in the form of meaningless garble, which can only be decrypted using a single key. As you browse the internet using a VPN, your data is encrypted and sent through a ‘tunnel’ – a secure pathway to the remote servers that provide your new IP address. This means that anybody who intercepts your data will be unable to track it back to where and who you are.

They Stop The Sale Of Data

VPN services are useful for preventing the sale of your data to companies, political parties and criminal organizations. The sale of personal data is staggeringly common. During the U.S elections, the firm Cambridge Analytica was found to have sold the Republican party huge amounts of data illegally skimmed from Facebook so that they could build accurate voter profiles. Preventing this is about more than privacy – it is about the upholding of democratic transparency and fair play.

VPN use would essentially make the collection of this data useless. By hiding the IP address of a user, the quality of collected data is immediately compromised and its sale made less likely. The widespread use of VPN services can be an act of resistance – although an admittedly very small one.

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