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What data does a VPN hide about us when we use it?

We are increasingly aware that we need to protect our privacy. In case you don’t know, our connections are monitored with the intention of obtaining an economic return. For this, different monitoring tools, cookies and bots are used with the intention of creating our profile. Then thanks to this profile, among other things, targeted advertising is sent and even that information ends up being sold to other companies. So for Internet users, to protect ourselves, we have the option of using a VPN or a Proxy. In this article, we are going to talk about what data a VPN hides about us when we use it and what protects our privacy.

Today everyone seeks to obtain our data even for different purposes. Not only are governments after our information, but also companies and even cybercriminals. Every time we surf the Internet, we leave a trail that is very sweet for different entities. Simply with the use of targeted advertising they can become very lucrative, so the use of a VPN can be a very interesting option to protect privacy.

What advantages do VPNs offer us and types

A VPN or virtual private network, is a computer network technology that allows a secure extension of the local area network (LAN) over a public network such as the Internet. Although there are unencrypted VPNs, it is best if they are encrypted, in fact, the most normal thing is that they incorporate robust encryption using 128 or 256-bit AES, although there are also others that use ChaCha20 such as WireGuard. Thanks to data encryption that gives us communications confidentiality, our data will travel as if it were encrypted and protected by a tunnel that keeps it safe from prying eyes and cybercriminals.

The data that a VPN hides is more than we think, and it also offers us advantages such as:

  • Avoid geoblocks to access multimedia content from different platforms, to which we would not otherwise have access. Also the censorship of some websites in certain countries.
  • Hide our data traffic from our ISP and companies.

As for the types of VPN we have two. Some would be the Free VPNs that are not always recommended with a few exceptions. You have to take into account that then they have to make profitable that service they offer and they could sell your data. On the other hand, we have those of payment that in addition to encrypting our connection we will obtain a higher connection speed. Some examples of this kind of quality would be NordVPN, SurfShark, CyberGhost, and HMA VPN.

What data does a VPN hide?

By collecting the metadata, governments and organizations can intuit current trends and movements. Then they are also interesting in relation to creating profiles to offer targeted advertising and earn money from the sale of certain products. The data that a VPN hides are:

  • The public IP address.
  • Your current location related to the IP we have.
  • If we browse in incognito mode, the different services could not relate the new IP to the cookies.
  • The device of origin of the messages.

This, for example, would be my current public IP:

On the other hand, if we use a VPN and we put Portugal, we would get this other IP:

If we click on Geolocate IP We will see how, in addition to the Internet provider, more data about us is obtained:

If this were, for example, the first public IP that I showed at the beginning, that is, the real one, they would already know both my current address, which would be the city, as well as my public IP.

From different means they would go collecting our browsing history to take advantage of it for various purposes. Not without first mentioning that they can also learn about the source device, such as the operating system and browser you use. One of them could be Whoer.net. Finally, what a VPN hides could improve privacy if we also combine it with a Proxy.

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