If you’re looking to watch content from another country that may be geo-restricted or you are looking for a secure way to browse the web without your internet provider or anyone else watching what you do, then using a VPN is definitely recommended.
Encrypting the data between your device and the websites you are communicating with will help secure your information online, making it safer to bank and carry out other tasks that involve your sensitive personal information.
Table of Contents
When Should I Use a VPN?
If you want to hide what you are doing online from your internet service provider or change your IP address to make it look like you are accessing the web from a different country so that you can access geo-restricted content (like watching BBC iPlayer from the USA), then a VPN will be of use to you.
But there are many other situations where a VPN can be useful.
Here are 16 of the most common:
To Hide Your Internet Activities From ISPs
A VPN is great to protect your data and browsing history from your internet service provider.
This is especially useful when you want to hide what websites you are visiting from your internet provider.
ISPs may throttle or reduce the speed of your internet connection for what they deem to be forbidden activities online.
You can use a VPN to get around ISP throttling because it hides what sites you are visiting from your provider.
It creates an encrypted tunnel between you and a dedicated VPN server that hides your location and makes your personal data unreadable.
When connecting to a VPN before browsing the internet, the only thing that your ISP will see is that you have connected to a VPN service and they will not see the individual websites you are connecting to.
To Provide Added Security On Public WiFi
VPN can help to secure your personal data when you’re using a public internet connection, like when you’re in an internet cafe, airport or hotel.
Public WiFi can often be poorly secured and you never know who’s on the network with you trying to spy on and intercept your data.
As long as you connect to a VPN before you begin surfing the web, anybody snooping over public WiFi will only be able to see that you are accessing the internet via a VPN.
And they will not be able to see what websites you are accessing.
Without the use of a VPN on public WiFi, a hacker may be able to see – by viewing your metadata – that you are connecting with your bank.
Connecting to a VPN service first will hide this and a hacker would only be able to see that you are connecting to a VPN server.
To Get Around Censorship
Governments of certain countries block certain websites to try and censor things that they don’t want their citizens to be influenced by certain ideas or to consume certain types of content.
For example, China prevents anyone located within their territory from viewing foreign news sites like the BBC and The New York Times.
They also block many foreign social media sites and search engines like Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube.
VPNs can be great tools for getting around these types of blocks because their software encrypts all of your online traffic through a secure tunnel and can make you appear as though you are accessing the internet from a more privacy-friendly country.
And there isn’t a way to track encrypted VPN traffic in real-time.
That’s why if governments want to obtain information about the websites that you have been visiting they will have to contact your VPN service provider.
And the best VPN services operate from privacy-friendly countries like Switzerland and do not store any logs on their customers’ online activities.
So there will be nothing to find when the authorities go looking.
To Hide Any BitTorrent Downloading
BitTorrent traffic is often monitored by your internet provider and, when detected, your connection may be throttled or shut down.
If you connect to a VPN before you browse any torrent search engines, your ISP will not be able to tell that you are browsing torrents or downloading them.
They will only see that you are online and connected to a VPN.
Using a VPN will keep all of your traffic anonymous and make it almost impossible for anyone to tell what websites you are visiting online.
When you’re surfing the web under normal circumstances, your internet provider can see everything that you do and if they see that you’ve been downloading copyrighted material, you may end up getting a warning letter from them.
To Watch TV From Other Countries
Many countries block access to their local TV content from outside of their country.
But these same services are available on the internet by using a VPN to make it look as though you are located in that country.
Many TV iPlayers are geo-restricted and block their content for viewers located outside of that country.
For example, if you why located in the United States and downloaded the Irish RTE iPlayer, you wouldn’t be able to watch Irish news or any other content on it because it would detect that you were accessing it from the United States.
However, if you were to connect to an Irish IP address through your VPN before accessing the RTE player, all of that content would be unlocked.
You Might Also Like: Should I Use A VPN At A Hotel? (And How To Stay Safe)
To Save Money When Buying Airline Tickets
You can save money buying airline tickets online by hiding your location and your internet history from online booking sites.
Travel companies use your online location and your ticket purchasing history to set a custom price that they want you to pay for airline tickets.
Taking the time to use a VPN to browse online ticket sales from multiple locations can often result in big savings.
To Keep Your Identity Anonymous
Using a VPN hides your real IP address and adds a further layer of encryption online.
This can be helpful if you like to keep your social media life separate from your personal life.
Some people may take offense to your political view or simply to comments that you make online.
This can be enough for somebody to want to dox you (reveal your true identity) and using a VPN to access sites like Reddit can make it a little bit more difficult for people to do so.
To Hide What You Do On The Internet From Your Family And Friends
Whether you’re shopping for Christmas presents or visiting potentially embarrassing websites, connecting to a VPN first will hide every trace of what you have been up to.
To Access Blocked Websites At Work Or School
If you have a little time to kill at school or work, you’ll often find that the best streaming and social media sites are blocked by the network administrator.
Connecting to a VPN can often unblock these websites and allow you that bit of escapism.
To Stay Safe And Secure On Hotel And Public Wi-Fi Networks
You should definitely use a VPN if connecting to hotel WiFi because networks like these often lack proper protected and this can put your personal information at a higher risk of being snooped on by a cybercriminal compared to when you are just using WiFi in your own home.
Connecting to a VPN before accessing hotel or public WiFi will help protect you from sniffing and man-in-the-middle and cyberattacks – such as man-in-the-middle cyber attacks that hackers can use to infiltrate unsecured public WiFi or a weak hotel WiFi network.
Hotspot Shield is a great example of this as it encrypts all of the traffic that goes through your computer so that hackers can’t steal your personal information from the connection, even if you’re using an unsecured public Wi-Fi hotspot.
To Stop Advertisers From Tracking You Online And Targeting You With Ads
Advertisers use things like cookies to track the sites that you visit around the internet and then show you adverts for products that they think you might be interested in buying, even if that means stalking you around the internet and showing you the same products over and over and over again.
Using a VPN will mean that these advertising companies won’t be able to track where you go online so easily, making it much more difficult to show you the same repetitive ads everywhere you go online.
To Secure Your Banking And Credit Card Info
Whenever you access your bank online and exchange sensitive financial information you are reliant on encryption to keep that information hidden from cybercriminals.
Using a VPN to connect to your bank or any site where you’re typing in credit card numbers offers an added layer of encryption making it much harder for hackers to snoop on or intercept any of your financial data.
To Protect Personal And Company Data When Working From Home
VPNs are commonly used to provide a secure encrypted tunnel for employees to access their corporate network.
Lots of companies provide VPN services for workers to connect to company networks as needed.
If your company uses this service and depending on how they have set things up, you may be able to connect via your operating system, or by using a VPN app that your company provides.
To Expand Content Across Your Favorite Streaming Sites
Did you know that Netflix’s library of content varies depending on the country you are accessing it from?
And some libraries of content are larger than others.
For example, Ireland and the United States have two of the largest content libraries across the whole of Netflix.
With a VPN, you could set your IP address to one in the US or Ireland and enjoy a few extra TV shows and movies compared to what you might have in your own country.
For Gaming
By encrypting your information and hiding your real IP address, a VPN for gaming can help grant you access to different gaming servers around the world that may be geo-blocked from your country.
Using a VPN for gaming can protect you from DDoS attacks, improve ping and reduce lag time by sending data packets through a more direct route than your regular ISP would.
This lowers ping by allowing data to flow more freely between your device and the gaming servers you are accessing.
To Make Voice And Video Chat More Secure
A VPN can keep your video and voice chats private and avoid your conversations from being overheard.
Even if a chat app has encryption built-in, A VPN will provide an added layer of encryption, just like it does when run over HTTPS.
However, please note that a VPN may slow down or reduce the quality of your online chat.
Final Thoughts
You don’t need to connect to a VPN service every time you want to use the internet but when it comes to keeping your ISP’s nose out of your business and accessing geo-restricted content they are worth their weight in gold.
