Imagine that you have a box in your house. In that box, you have passwords to your bank accounts, email addresses, your personal information, all the private things in your life. Would you let other people easily steal the contents of the box and use them against you?

This box may be computer/phone/tablet, when you connect to Internet there is a great chance people out there are listening to everything that goes in and out of it.

If you could somehow scramble the information as it goes in and out of your computer so that those who are out there listening can’t make sense of it, your privacy would be protected, you wouldn’t be opened to the possibilities of identity theft, credit card fraud, and the content that you consume online and which only concerns to you would remain private.

You want this information far from the hands of someone that could use it against you, some examples of this are:

• Your medical searches and how these could affect your career, or insurance costs.
• Banking information, which could even put you at the risk of being kidnapped in many countries.
• Your identity.
• Your sexual preferences in countries where society isn’t as open as you’d wish.
• Your political preferences, which in the future might be used against you when you need to switch jobs, gets a loan, etc.
• Information about informants or delicate sources if you are a journalist, lawyer, policemen, judge, witness to a crime.
• Financial/Corporate documents that could be used against you, someone else or against a company.

Your dreams and fears are at stake if you are connected to the internet openly, a vanilla internet connection is not the way you want to be online.

Protect your privacy

How can you protect yourself? How can you encrypt your connection to the internet, so that even your Internet Service Provider can’t be snooping on what you do, thus respecting the basic human right to privacy?

You need a VPN. A VPN or Virtual Private Network connects your computer to a private network across the public internet through a “tunnel”, an encrypted tunnel on which only your computer and the receiving end can make sense of the data being exchanged. The VPN computer on the other end is used as a proxy for every internet request you make, and it forwards you the encrypted responses back.

According to our friends of LifeHacker,”the most important thing you need to know about a VPN: It secures your computer’s internet connection to guarantee that all of the data you’re sending and receiving is encrypted and secured from prying eyes”.