I have a three part question: 1) how does a VPN work 2) what does it cover, wifi or phone internet and 3) what VPN would you recommend?
- how does a VPN work
Basically they act as a middle man, whatever you search or connect to goes through them first, so they are able to anonymize it, hiding (or more specifically encrypting) your activity. Any kind of information that goes back to your VPN connected device is also encrypted, meaning your internet service provider has no idea what you have just received. Maybe it’s porn, maybe it’s highly classified FBI document, maybe it’s illegal drugs distribution schedules.
- what does it cover, wifi or phone internet
Both, as long as you are connected to the VPN any internet connect will go through the VPN.
- what VPN would you recommend?
It depends on things like where you live and of course, price. Generally most of the popular ones are ok.
Its basically an intermediary between the ISP and you cloaking your position and other pieces of metadata that usually gets read and saved by the cookies and such
And it covers however much you bother funneling through
That depends on what the purpose of the vpn is supposed to be
You already have explanation of what VPN is, as for chosing one - that’s difficult question. It all depends on what you’re trying to do and who you’re hiding from. If you want to hide your traffic from your ISP for privacy reasons, anything will work. If you’re Apple user and have iCloud+, icloud private relay is excellent for that. If not just pick any VPN. Paid ones are way faster than free ones so if you want to have it on all the time you have to spend some money. If you’re doing something shady then you should look for VPN services based in countries that don’t cooperate with law enforcement in your country and doesn’t require retaining logs. If you’re doing something illegal tor is the answer. But use tor browser, not tor client built in into brave or something like that. And don’t forget tor doesn’t work on iOS no matter what some shitty app tells you.
A VPN is a tunnel from your PC or your router to a VPN server. Everything you send over the internet first goes throigh the tunnel.
it’s just a secure tunnel between your device and another computer. So the communication between your device and that computer is secured. the typical application is to connect to your company intranet when travelling (for example a sales-person who want to check-prices). It can also be used for internet browsing as you connect to a first PC and this PC connects to the internet on your behalf
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You can install-it on various device, and in general reroute all your internet traffic through the VPN
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The most secure way is to install a VPN server on your PC at home. A VPN isn’t secured when located in a tax-haven with sub-standard data-privacy laws
It is a server somewhere that you can access remotely. There are many different applications like accessing your data from the company server when you are on a business trip, without the data being publicly on the internet. The VPN services you are talking about essentially do the same thing but have a different use.
You normally would ask the internet service provider something like “Hey, connect me to reddit.com”. And you might not like that your ISP or your company IT guy knows that you visit such filthy websites. You instead ask your ISP “Hey can you connect me to my VPN service”. You then ask the VPN to give you data from reddit.com.
Reddit only sees the VPN server from their end. That can be used to your advantage by having the server be in a different country. That way you can tell streaming services that have the rights to a movie only in one region that you are in that region.
There should be no way that it was you who asked the VPN to go to that site. But that isn’t always the case. The free ones collect user data and sell it.
That’s why I would recommend a paid service and not a free one.