VPN or Virtual Private Network has become more trending in recent years because people are more concerned about their personal privacy nowadays. The product allows most users to gain private internet access at their comfort place and time. Over the years, VPNs have helped many businesses and individuals in terms of resolving privacy issues and strengthening security. VPN continues to help users to access their favorite content and prevent them to get in contact with privacy scandals.
So what is a VPN? A VPN is a secure connection between one network and another over a separate and private network on the internet. It can be like a tunnel or a unique path in which it can be passed by data to be sent to its destination.
Interestingly, VPN tunnels use encryption to protect the data, so no one can see or interrupts your connection. Do you know that by default, without VPN's protecting connection, ISP can visit any online activities under their network? Any third party such as a hacker, can snoop into your online traffic data?
Therefore, it is not surprising that the VPN is becoming a trend and widely used by many audiences, especially among Windows users. For those of you who want to try a free VPN but are still in doubt, even after hearing some of the potential online threats above, here are some benefits and advantages of using a VPN for Windows.
Working remotely securely
Travelers frequently use VPNs to access their company's network, including all its local network resources, while on the road. Local resources do not have to be explicitly exposed to the internet, which enhances their internet security.
Block local network and ISP from seeing online activities
If we use a public Wi-Fi connection, your browsing activity on non-HTTPS sites is visible, if they know how to look, to everyone nearby. We can connect to a VPN if we want to cover our browsing activities for more privacy. The local network can use only a single, stable VPN link. All other traffic travels over the connection to the VPN.
Access geo-limited websites and services
Suppose we want to access Netflix accounts when traveling outside the country or want to use American media sites such as Netflix, Pandora, and Hulu. In that case, we will access these region-restricted services if we connect to a VPN located in the USA.
No more internet censorship
Many people use VPNs to get around the internet limitation by a government firewall to access the full internet world outside.
Files downloading
To download files through a torrent, many people use VPN connections. Even if we download fully legal torrents, VPNs can be useful. Our ISP is throttling the torrent site and making it incredibly sluggish; we can use the torrent client to get faster speeds on a VPN. The same applies to other traffic forms that can interfere with our ISP (unless it interferes with VPN traffic itself).
Stay anonymous online
Do you know that every single device has an identity for its hardware? It's called MAC address. As stated above, it can be used to identify your hardware under a particular network that is currently connected. Another thing that people may not know is the IP address. It also can be used to identify a physical location. With the help of a VPN for Windows, anonymity can be achieved. VPN provider will assign a new IP address and mask the real IP for security and privacy.
Split-tunneling
The feature that proxy doesn't have. Using a VPN, each app that needs an internet connection can be set up, whether it needs to be tunneled under the encrypted VPN network or not.
Kill-switch
This feature helps you cut the connection in case of the internet is down upon a visit to a website. This avoids personal information leaks online.
Opt-out from personalized advertisements
ISP can see users' activities under their network without VPN's encryption - some VPNs even use the same encryption type that the bank generally uses to gather the users' online behavior to be sold to advertisers. Now you know where the personalized ads were coming from. With VPN, no one can peek into the internet traffic, including ISP; thus, they can sell your online behavior to any third party!
We can conclude that a VPN for Windows is beneficial for security and privacy and also gives other possibilities that are not available without a VPN, such as securely accessing working networks from a remote place and bypassing internet censorship. Nowadays, almost every things moving digital. Practicing smart computing by merely not clicking any link from the email to consciously protect information from leaking online using a VPN is a must. Remember to connect with friends and family so they can protect themselves.
