Today’s VPN Is the Tech Equivalent of a Swiss Army Pocket Knife

Save Money on Websites and Currency Exchange

A VPN can be used as a tool to save money or find discounts. A number of different websites use your ISP information to track where you are and how many times you’ve visited their site. Ticket companies, for example, have a habit of raising prices for repeat visitors or making other alterations to their booking processes to make more money. It’s not a practice that has aged well, but many still try to do it, and a VPN can prevent this process, saving you money.

The benefits are even more pronounced when dealing with online currency exchanges. Consumer-focused currency exchange tools will typically change their rates based on your location to increase profits and avoid certain currency exchange practices. A VPN helps prevent this as well, allowing you to “shop around” by changing your country and re-examining prices.

This type of dynamic pricing happens all the time online, even when it comes to things like Apple Music or Microsoft Office 365. Increasingly, a VPN is one of your best shopping friends when going online.

Bypass Regional Restrictions

It’s not just prices that are affected by your ISP location: entertainment also takes a hit. Streaming services offer different content to different countries, often based on licensing issues or agreements, which can affect the movies, shows, music, games and other types of content that you’re able to stream online. This can get aggravating if you are looking for specific content, but find that’s available in other countries instead of yours. VPNs can’t always help in these situations, but they are pretty good at giving you additional options to deal with regional restrictions, including automatically switching over to servers that will allow content access, or letting you pick your country of origin when online.

Government Protection

Government internet tracking is a tricky issue – and for the citizens of some countries, a particularly dangerous one. Dissidents famously use VPNs to share information, journalism, and viewpoints that may otherwise land them in jail. Some countries (notably China) put a lot of effort into banning VPNs and tracking citizens for this reason. VPNs still remain a vital tool in these digital wars.

However, you may not be as immune from these problems as you think. In recent years other governments, particularly in western countries, have grown interested in tracking internet users and restricting content when it comes to pornography and other issues. VPNs can be used to easily avoid such new regulations, which means 1) VPNs will become more popular for western users and 2) governments really don’t know how the internet works.

No Internet Activity Logs

On a somewhat related note, some VPNs will keep logs of your activity, and some will not. Generally speaking, VPNs that you pay for are more likely to offer logless browsing sessions, while free VPNs are more likely to keep logs. Most people are interested in avoiding any kind of activity logs even if the VPN provider doesn’t use those logs for anything alarming (some may try to sell the data to advertisers). Many governments, including the United States, can subpoena such logs in legal cases if necessary, and many try to use such tracking in other ways. A good VPN will not keep logs, although it may cost more.

Send Secure P2P Messages

Peer-to-peer or P2P connections are often used to exchange files, money, and other information directly with another device. These connections can be fast and handy when working with friends or colleagues. However, they are sometimes uniquely vulnerable to attack or manipulation. Many VPNs offer secure P2P connections to help reduce these dangers.

Data Encryption and Hacking Protection

Data encryption is at the heart of what a VPN does – and this encryption is particularly useful when stopping hacking attempts, activity spies, and so on. It helps you keep your devices protected when you are on a network in a public place, especially wireless networks that may be more vulnerable to attack.

There are a lot of VPN encryption types: your router may have a couple encryption options, but VPNs usually have access to more than a dozen protocols – and some even let you choose your preferred method of encryption. Not all these options are equal, but they do all make it significantly more difficult for hackers to get private data from you. Advanced VPNs also guarantee to detect and stop “leaks” where your ISP information escapes unintentionally. They incorporate kill switches as well which automatically shut down the connection and preserve privacy if it looks like a leak is occurring.