The acronym VPN has been around too long for you to have ever heard them. You know what they have to do with the Internet and little else … If you have come this far, it is because you know that using them is good for your phone, and even more so in times when security takes precedence over all things.
What is a VPN? what a VPN (Virtual Private Network or Virtual Private Network, in Spanish) does essentially is create a tunnel between the user and the websites to which they are connecting, which prevents anyone else with any kind of intent from seeing the information you are sending over the network.
Today there are many reasons to use a virtual private network, especially if we take into account that the vast majority of traffic in the entire network occurs on our smartphone. The more we browse from our phone, the greater risk we put our data and, precisely, the mobile phone has become the nerve center of our private life. In the small device we have our bank details, our personal photos and the credentials of an infinity of services that, for logical reasons, we must keep safe yes or yes.
When to use a VPN
There are several circumstances in which installing a VPN should be mandatory in order to preserve the integrity and security of the user.
Public WiFi networks
You may find yourself in a foreign country on more than one occasion without a data connection. At this time mobile devices are often connected to public Wi-Fi networks that, as everyone knows, are not very secure.
If you cannot avoid connecting to these networks, whether you are in Spain or in any other country, not secure, you must avoid at all costs that someone can access your smartphone through that connection. By setting up a VPN on your mobile you are going to make sure that data traffic is private and no one sees the information you are sending over the network.
Avoid tracking
Another reason to use a VPN is to prevent your Internet service provider from tracking your whereabouts. Your network provider cannot see what it is doing when you access an encrypted web page (https: //), but it can track the actual web sites you visit. Once you connect to a VPN service, your ISP can no longer track this information.
International travel
Another common use for a VPN service is for those who travel internationally. Many popular entertainment and news services, have geo-restrictions for their content, so using a VPN that has servers in the US or another region can allow you to watch your series and movies from abroad, always that the service has not blocked these apps.
In addition, some countries such as China are subject to a strong censorship that prevents even browsing on Google. By using a VPN as an intermediary in our connection, we can avoid blocked sites and navigate normally.
Data encryption
Even if you are connected to your personal Wi-Fi network, using this tool allows you to keep your Internet traffic safe and avoid leaving traces in your browsing history that may be accessible to third parties.
Free or paid VPN
There is an endless list of VPN services that you can use, so the first step is to determine if a free or paid service is best suited to your needs. While a free service sounds attractive and is recommended if you want to try the system for the first time, there are several reasons why it is sometimes better to use a paid service.
Free services cannot justify the same infrastructure expense as a paid service, so overall, you are likely to experience more inconsistent performance with free VPNs. Also, some free VPNs raise suspicions because of their logging practices and what they do with our data.
Setting up a VPN
What would seem that, at first, requires a huge tutorial of configuration steps and a great knowledge of networks, today it is as simple as downloading an app and registering with it. The major VPN service providers design their applications to be intuitive and easy to use.
Many of them have a connection button that occupies the entire screen that, when pressed, already allows us to navigate through a VPN and protect our data. So easy and simple that it will make you think like you haven’t tried it before.
