I have more than 10 years of experience in the cybersecurity field. Recently, I began to advise private clients on cybersecurity issues, and ran into the problem of extremely poor privacy protection of most users. When I tell clients that they need to hide their IP address using VPN service, many do not understand why this is necessary. I will explain in detail.
All Internet providers log their customers' activities on the Internet. That is, the Internet provider knows which sites you visited. There are many situations when the user needs to protect their personal data on the Internet and gain freedom of communication.
Example 1. Business needs to transmit sensitive data over the Internet so that no one can intercept it. Most companies use VPN technology to transfer information between branch offices.
Example 2. Many services on the Internet operate on the principle of geographic location and prohibit access for users from other countries.
Example 3. Blocking certain sites in the office and in the country. Often in offices they block access to social networks so that employees do not spend working time communicating. For example, many Google services are blocked in China. If a resident of China works with a company from Europe, then there is a need to use services such as Google Disk.
Example 4. Hide visited sites from the Internet provider. There are times when you need to hide the list of visited sites from the Internet provider, as well as encrypt all traffic.
VPN provides encryption between the client and the VPN server. The main purpose of a VPN is to encrypt traffic and change IP addresses.
Thanks to traffic encryption, your ISP will not know which sites you visited on the Internet. In this case, you have IP address of the country, where the VPN located. By visiting ip location org you can check that your IP address and displayed location is changed.
When connected to a VPN, a secure channel is created between your computer and the VPN server. All data in this channel is encrypted. The logs of the ISP will be a set of random characters. Thanks to VPN, you will get freedom of communication and protect your personal data.
I always tell clients about a comprehensive approach to security. User security is not just the VPN connection. It is important which VPN client you use. Currently, services offer convenient VPN clients - these are programs that facilitate the configuration of VPN connections.
But in my opinion using such programs is quite dangerous. It’s source code is the property of the company and no one publishes it. Users cannot find out what data collects about them. The VPN program can identify you as a specific user even when the logs on the server are turned off.
If your business needs a high level of anonymity, I recommend use the official OpenVPN release with open source code. At first, this may seem uncomfortable, but you will get used to it over time, if anonymity is really important for you.