Thanks to the digital transformation and easy access to the Internet, there are five billion Internet users globally with a 62.5 percent Internet penetration rate.
However, the Internet is open to everybody, including cybercriminals, hackers, and intruders waiting to steal your personal information. Also, many public search engines, Internet service providers (ISP), and social media platforms can access your online private data and share it with advertising agencies.
Hence, it is necessary to protect your digital privacy using an affordable VPN. Let’s discuss in detail how the cheapest vpn helps keep you safe while browsing or streaming over the Internet.
Protecting Online Privacy Using VPN
A virtual private network (VPN) is the only feasible solution that creates a hidden virtual tunnel over the open Internet to encrypt your online traffic.
You should know that the IP address is your online identity over the Internet and its metadata or header contain information about your geo-location. Your ISP assigns you a unique IP address when connecting your laptop or any smart device to the Internet.
When you connect to your home router, the ISP can track the web address that you type on the browser. Also, some websites and ad networks use your IP address to mark your geo-location for targeted marketing.
Here comes the VPN to your rescue to encapsulate your online traffic in a tunnel hidden from your ISP and different websites.
A VPN essentially fulfills the following basic requirements:
Protecting Online Identity and Location
A VPN uses advanced security techniques such as military-grade 256-bit AES encryption. This way, it can hide your original and destination IP address to guarantee complete anonymity.
A VPN service hosts thousands of servers worldwide, allowing you to connect to any of them. This way, the VPN not only re-routes the online traffic via the selected server but also masks your original IP address with that of the VPN server to conceal your identity.
Safe Browsing
Do you trust all the websites you visit daily? Don’t. Several websites use cookies, eavesdrop on the data, and breach online privacy. You can’t open a website without accepting cookies and disabling ad-blocking software.
If you don’t delete the cookies later, you are open to online threats that can access your confidential data and track your location.
It’s a scary picture; however, it’s essential to tell you some bitter facts before you access another website without a VPN. A secure VPN guarantees safe browsing by hiding your location and IP address. Also, it encrypts your online traffic, making it impossible for the websites to use cookies to access your personal information.
Preventing Packet Sniffing
Whenever you surf the Internet without a VPN, you are exposed to everyone, even the cybercriminals who want to keep a close eye on the online packet transaction.
Whether you send an email, share a file, enter your credit card information, make an online transaction, or visit a website, you send and receive packets. To sum up, the packets contain confidential information about your online activities, streaming, and browsing.
Sometimes, malicious onlookers tap on these data packets to monitor your online traffic and steal your personal information.
The good news is that you can use a VPN to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, allowing you to perform your online banking transactions without worrying about intruders.
Affordable Vs Free VPNs
Here is a catch as you’ll find several paid and free VPNs over the Internet. However, don’t fall into the trap of free VPNs as there is a hidden cost.
The free VPNs don’t offer you unlimited bandwidth to stream. Also, they have a limited server network, thus restricting your choices of connecting to different servers.
Also, the free VPNs don’t ensure a no-log policy, meaning they record your online traffic, IP address, and destination URL. Later, they sell the information to the marketing agencies, thus ruining the entire purpose of offering digital privacy.
Lucky for you, you can find affordable VPNs offering state-of-the-art security features, such as a kill switch that prevents DNS and IP leaks.
Final Thoughts
You are responsible for securing your personal information over the Internet using a reliable and affordable VPN.
The key takeaway of the above guide is to emphasize the importance of using a secure VPN connection to hide your IP address, destination URL, and other online activities.
Before selecting a suitable and affordable VPN, you must consider certain features, such as the total number of servers, simultaneous connections, speed, and no-log policy.
