What’s a VPN?

You don’t have to be James Bond to benefit from beefing up your online security. Privacy ought to be enshrined as a basic human more widely, and that carries over to an expectation of privacy online.

You may figure that you’re doing nothing so out of the ordinary to interest hackers, data thieves, and snoops, but that’s exactly who they target. Regular folks like you and me.

Virtual private networks, or VPNs, work to anonymize your online traffic to keep those snoops from tracking your activity across the internet, whether you’re browsing, emailing, streaming, banking, or shopping.

Nearly half of Americans are using VPNs these days. Are you one of them yet?

what in the world is it?

VPN stands for virtual private network. Acting as a middleman, it routes all the information exchange between you and other websites’ servers on the internet, in both directions, through a server owned by the VPN service.

Should a website or a bad actor try to follow you across the web, they won’t see your unique, identifiable IP address, only that of the VPN server you’re connected to. Since these are shared servers—any decent VPN will have thousands of servers to choose from—you disappear into the crowd if a data thief or snoop tries to eavesdrop on your digital trail.

Favorite VPNs that I’ve used, tested, and investigated for transparency and adherence to no-logs policies and promises of customer privacy include NordVPN, Mullvad VPN, and Proton VPN. I’ve used ’em all and have given them a rare recommendation. When it comes to security apps, why settle for half-baked? You only need one VPN, so make it count and pick one of the best.

Proton even has a free tier of its VPN that works quite well. When I used it, I was impressed. Most free VPNs I come across, I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot golf club. Many are full of malware, but Proton VPN, both its free and paid versions, is legit.

Proton also has a Proton Unlimited suite of privacy apps that also impressed me when I tested them.

Need more details on the best VPNs? I’ve highlighted the three best that I’ve used here in this article, and I’ve used a bunch. But I discuss them in depth more in my guide to the best VPNs, and I even clue you in to which VPNs to avoid, again based on personal experience and my best interpretation of Sherlock Holmes digging into the VPNs’ privacy policies.

Think about using a password manager, too. They allow you to generate extremely complicated passwords, one unique one per website account, without having to remember them.

The combination of a VPN and a password manager will set you on a solid footing, much more private and secure than using the web without any privacy protection at all.