Do You Actually Need a VPN?

Usually not.

That’s an unpopular answer, because the VPN industry spends enormous money on
advertising and most of what you’ll read about VPNs was written by someone
earning a commission on the sale. I’m not, so here’s the version I give
customers who ask.

What a VPN actually does

It routes your internet traffic through a company’s server first, encrypted
along the way. Two consequences: whoever runs the network you’re on can’t see
what you’re doing, and the websites you visit see the VPN’s address instead of
yours.

That’s it. Everything else claimed for VPNs is either a side effect of those
two things or marketing.

What it doesn’t do

This is the part the ads leave out, and it’s the part that gets people into
trouble.

• It doesn’t stop viruses or malware. A VPN encrypts the
  connection. It doesn’t inspect what comes down it. You can download something
  awful over a VPN just as easily.
• It doesn’t make you anonymous. The moment you log into
  email, a bank, or a social account, that service knows exactly who you are. A
  VPN changes where you appear to be, not who you are.
• It doesn’t protect you from phishing. If you type your
  password into a fake bank site, it’s gone. Encrypted, but gone.
• It doesn’t make your connection faster. It makes it
  slower — always, by some amount. Extra distance and encryption cost time.
• It doesn’t hide anything from the VPN company. You’ve
  moved the trust, not removed it. Your ISP can’t see your traffic anymore.
  The VPN provider can.

That last one is the whole game. A VPN is only worth having if you trust the
provider more than you trust your internet company.

When it’s genuinely worth it

• Public WiFi you don’t control. Hotels, airports, coffee
  shops, conference centers. This is the case VPNs were built for and it’s still
  the best one.
• Travel, particularly overseas. Some networks block or
  monitor heavily, and some banking apps behave badly when they see a foreign
  address.
• You have a specific reason to hide traffic from your ISP.
  A real reason, not a vague sense that someone’s watching.

When it isn’t

If you’re at home on your own connection, doing normal things — email,
shopping, streaming, video calls with family — a VPN adds cost and latency and
protects you from a threat that isn’t there. Your home network is not a coffee
shop.

It’ll also break things. Some streaming services block VPN addresses. Some
banks flag logins from unexpected locations. Printers and smart home devices
stop being reachable if traffic is routed wrong. I get called out to fix that
more often than you’d think, and the answer is usually “turn the VPN off.”

Free VPNs are how machines get infected

Running a VPN service costs real money — servers, bandwidth, staff. If
nobody’s paying, the money is coming from somewhere else. Usually that’s logging
your browsing and selling it, which is precisely the thing you installed a VPN
to prevent. Sometimes it’s bundled adware, and then it’s my problem to clean
up.

“No-logs policy” is a sentence on a website, not a fact, unless an
independent auditor has checked it. Plenty of providers claim it. Fewer have
proved it.

If you’re not willing to pay for a VPN, you’re better off with no VPN.

If you want one anyway

What to look for:

• Paid. See above.
• Independently audited, with the audit published.
• A kill switch that blocks traffic if the VPN drops,
  instead of quietly falling back to your normal connection.
• Split tunneling, so your printer and local devices keep
  working.

The two I’d point people toward are Mullvad and
Proton VPN. Both are paid, both have been independently
audited, and neither is one of the ones carpeting YouTube with sponsorships.
I have no affiliation with either and I don’t earn anything if you sign up.

I’d be cautious about the heavily advertised names generally. The advertising
budget comes from somewhere, and the review sites recommending them are usually
paid per signup.

Getting it set up properly

Most VPN problems I see aren’t the VPN — they’re the configuration. No kill
switch, so it silently stops protecting anything. No split tunneling, so the
printer vanishes. Installed on one device when the household needed it on the
router, or on the router when only the laptop needed it.

I can set one up correctly, on a device or across a whole network, and make
sure your local equipment still works afterward. I can also tell you, for free,
over the phone, whether you need one at all.

Related: home WiFi and network setup, and
virus and malware removal if a free VPN
has already left you something.

Ask me first

I serve Magnolia, The Woodlands, Conroe, Montgomery, Spring, Woodforest, and
Lake Windcrest.

Call (346) 291-7330 — or
send a message and I’ll get back to you within 24
hours.