Today we are increasingly aware that our Internet traffic is being monitored. Surely enough of you shortly after having visited a product’s website an e-mail with the product offer has arrived or you have seen it in an advertising banner after a short time. Cookies, trackers, and other tools are continually monitoring our internet activity. For this reason, Internet users are increasingly looking for new ways to protect their privacy. The most used tools are usually proxies and VPNs. In this article we are going to find out if a VPN really prevents the tracking of our Internet activity.
The first thing we are going to do is find out what advantages the use of a VPN can bring us. We will also see if all VPNs offer us the same performance and level of anonymity. Finally, we will determine if the use of a VPN prevents us from tracking our activity on the network of networks.
Benefits of using a VPN
A VPN or virtual private network can be defined as a computer network technology that allows a secure extension of our local area network LAN over a public network, such as the Internet. We are going to do this by making a virtual point-to-point connection through the use of dedicated connections, which may or may not be encrypted. The most convenient thing is that they are encrypted, because the fact that they are not encrypted will not provide us with significant advantages, in fact, today most VPNs use a robust encryption based on 128 or 256 bits AES, and also on ChaCha20 if It uses the WireGuard VPN protocol, one of the safest and fastest protocols that currently exist.
A good VPN is like a tunnel in which our data travels encrypted end-to-end to protect us from cybercriminals and prying eyes. In this sense, it provides us with a double functionality, that of protection by keeping us safe and that of privacy. Thus, in public Wi-Fi networks, from this article we recommend their use if we want to keep our data safe.
As for the main advantages we have, apart from the previously mentioned, the following:
- Avoid geoblocks by being able to access websites or streaming multimedia content that we would not have access to.
- It hides our traffic from our Internet provider and allows us to browse more anonymously.
- They are used to hide P2P downloads .
- We can play on-line without limits avoiding IP address blocks .
Are all VPNs the same? Do they offer us the same?
We could classify VPNs into two groups, free and paid. In general, the free ones are the most dangerous, somehow they have to survive and pay for the resources so that you can use them. Therefore, to a greater or lesser extent, the product is you, and they have to get the benefits from somewhere. When we connect to a free VPN server, it is very possible that the owner of this VPN can inspect the network traffic that passes through the server, with the objective
This is not to say that some free VPNs from big companies like Cloudflare, Mozilla or Opera can offer us a safe alternative. However, since they are free, many people will use them and we are going to face low speed problems on many occasions and in the worst case, the lack of security in the VPN. In the case of using the free VPN services of the Internet “greats” like Cloudflare, you will not have too many problems, otherwise, you could have high latency and low speed.
Does a VPN really prevent us from being tracked?
Nowadays, what we look for when browsing the Internet is privacy and being safe, safe from both cybercriminals and malicious software. The first thing we have to do is have an updated operating system, which has a good antivirus and, if possible, antimalware software. The second thing is to use our common sense and use it not to download attachments (unless necessary), and be careful with the links (you have to check the URL) because it can be a Phishing attack.
Therefore, these measures can improve our security, but not our privacy. For this we need a quality VPN if we want to remain anonymous. A good free VPN like the ones we mentioned in the previous section can comply, but in terms of speed they will end up disappointing us unless we only use them to surf the Internet.
Also, the danger of a free VPN is that they may have faulty software, poor-quality encryption, or even no encryption, and may have DNS leaks. In this article we recommend you check if you are going to the Internet through the VPN, checking the public IP to which we are connecting, in case of going to the Internet with the public IP address of your house, the VPN will not be working. It is also recommended to perform a DNS leak test to avoid problems with the resolution of domain names.
In short, a VPN prevents us from being tracked and monitored, especially if it is paid and provides the no-log or no-log service, be very careful if you connect to a free VPN, because surely the product is you.