7 Prime Examples of When a VPN Saved the Day

When Falling in Love with a New Show

Let’s say you spent the weekend at a friend’s house and they introduced you to Brooklyn Nine-Nine. You loved the show. You couldn’t get enough of it. And there are so many more seasons that you can watch! So, when you get back home you waste no timing hopping on Netflix and looking for the comedy – only to find it’s not there. This makes you pretty sad: You don’t want to spend money on another monthly subscription for something like Hulu, but you really want to binge-watch. 

Then you do a little research online and find out that Brooklyn Nine-Nine actually is on Netflix…everywhere but the United States. It’s some strange licensing arrangement that doesn’t make much sense to you – but then you read that a VPN helps solve the problem. You download a VPN on your iPad, and when it asks you to pick a country to connect from, you choose servers in Canada. Now you can access a version of Netflix that carries the show.

When Doing Research

VPNs aren’t just about getting access to entertainment – bypassing geolocks and regional access can have other important benefits. Imagine that you are a student in Latvia working on an important research project about the United States presidential election. You find a great video on YouTube that’s a news network interview with one of the presidential candidates. There’s only one problem – for whatever reason, that network has blocked all of its YouTube videos in your region. So you switch on your VPN, change your location to the United States, and watch the video with subtitles on. It turns out to have some great quotes that you can immediately use to finish your paper on time and get a better grade than you had hoped for.

Or maybe you’re a systems engineer in Turkey, and you are trying to post a technical question on a subreddit for program developers. But you realize Turkey has actually blocked Reddit, so you turn on a VPN and set your location to mainland Europe: You post your question and get a dozen replies with the information you need for your coding conundrum.

When Planning an International Trip

Picture this: You’re planning a great international trip to Argentina. While there are many bus options available, you quickly realize that you would prefer to rent a car for some of the city-to-city exploring you want to do. There’s an international rental company that makes it really easy to search for rentals and pay immediately in U.S. dollars from your computer…but you don’t really like how much the rental costs per day.

Fortunately, you know a couple VPN tricks. You turn on your VPN, and set your location to Argentina, then access the same rental company again. The rental prices are now in Argentinean pesos, which ends up saving you around 30% of the cost. You start looking at bus fares and realize that the same trick may be able to save you even more money throughout your vacation.

When Using Unsecured Wi-Fi

Office workers from all kinds of industries have experienced this issue before: They take a mobile device into work, and log onto the public Wi-Fi system without a second thought. But it turns out their employer doesn’t actually do a great job of protecting the Wi-Fi network, and your web browser starts acting strangely. Worried, you run a scan and find out that you have a virus that’s being spread on purpose through your company’s wireless network.

Naturally, you let IT know what happened, but it’s hard to tell if they’ll try to fix the issue, or if they’ll do anything at all. So you download a VPN and make sure to always use it when connected to your work’s Wi-Fi system. In the following months, your peers struggle with multiple virus issues and even identity theft, but you remain clear of problems.

When Fighting Government Censorship

Here’s an all-too-real story about worker who calls herself “Quan Shixin” from China. Quan wants to get the word out about how local Chinese officials seized the land from her village for a big commercial project and barely gave the people any money in return for it, leaving much of the village destitute. Unfortunately for Quan, China has its “Great Firewall” which prevents many types of web communication and access to most social networks.

But Quan soon formed a circle of dissidents that taught her how to use encryption and VPNs. She soon manages to spread information about her situation and even do interviews with journalists around the world. Since China has outlawed VPNs and cracked down on dissidents, Quan has been jailed twice for her activities. But she still finds alternative VPNs to use and continues to speak out.

When a Busy Parent Needs to Work from Home

Let’s say you work for a far more responsible company than the one mentioned above. But you recently had a child, and your responsibilities as a parent are a bit overwhelming. You would love to start work again after taking some leave, but you can’t really make it to the office. So you ask your manager about working from home for a while using your desktop. Your manager is willing, but you deal with some pretty confidential information and your superiors don’t want to risk compromising that data by creating a portal to a home network.

But then your manager has a word with the IT department, and finds that IT has actually helped workers do this before. They walk you through how to set up a trustworthy VPN on your home computer that will allow you to access all of your company’s features without endangering company data. Both sides are satisfied with this solution.

When Avoiding ISP Tracking

Maybe you’re like this user on Reddit, and you actually took the time to read your internet service provider’s (ISP’s) contract, and realized that they not only have the right to track your activity, but that they also sell your browsing data to other countries to make money. You really aren’t a fan of this, but there aren’t really any other ISPs in your area that you can switch to. Helpful people point out that a VPN is an ideal situation in this case, because it can help encrypt your browsing data so your ISP can’t see what you do. With a little work, you can find a VPN that doesn’t log your data, and sign up for greater privacy.