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6 common VPN myths debunked
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Quote:VPNs aren’t understood nearly as well as they should be, given the growing prevalence of cybersecurity threats and massive corporate data breaches. There are certain VPN myths that are far too common, which is why I’d like to set the record straight!

1. Why should I pay for a VPN? I’ll just get a free one!
If Google’s growing data empire and the huge Cambridge Analytica scandal at Facebook haven’t given you a clue, let me spell it out for you: when a for-profit company provides you with a service for free, that’s because they are using you to make money. You are the product, not the customer. Don’t forget this rule if you’re weighing the benefits of a free VPN vs. a paid one. How a free VPN makes money depends on their sense of ethics, but none of the potential solutions bode well for your online security. The most common methods involve carefully logging your traffic and then injecting ads into whatever you do online or simply selling that data to third parties. Less scrupulous free VPNs have even sold their users’ bandwidth to corporations and hackers or used their access to deliver malware. Free VPNs also usually offer fewer features and don’t work as well as premium VPNs do. They usually support less staff and can’t release frequent updates to stay on top of the latest cybersecurity trends. Premium paid VPNs answer to customers, not advertisers, so they have a stronger motivation to deliver a product that works.

2. A VPN will make my internet too slow to use
It’s true that a VPN can slow down your internet speed, but it doesn’t have to. The severity of the slowdown also depends on the settings you choose and on your VPN speed, but it will usually be too small to notice if you’re just browsing online. It’s natural for a VPN to reduce the speed of your internet access by some small amount, since your traffic has to be encrypted and then decrypted before it gets anywhere. Another source of additional latency will be the server your traffic has to visit to be decrypted, but depending on the country you choose, you may not notice any difference at all. If you proxy your traffic through a country on the other side of the world, your latency will definitely take a hit. If you select your own country, however, the slowdown will probably barely be noticeable. There are also a few scenarios in which you might experience a speedup. To throttle data, ISPs have to see your actual traffic, which they can’t do when it’s encrypted. If they’re prevented from throttling, that means higher internet speeds for you. In rare cases, your VPN might actually take your traffic on a more efficient route than your ISP would – especially if your ISP is sending your traffic somewhere it shouldn’t be sending it.

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