What can VPN do for me? What is a “VPN?”

Our lives are becoming more and more internet driven with online banking, personal photo exchanges, file sharing, social networking, and often across completely unsecured networks in unfamiliar territory. Traveling for work, at the coffee shop, at school, all become places where your data is completely out in the open. Do you have a habit of leaving your keys to your car sitting ON your car, or your bank account information on your front door for anyone to see? I didn’t think so! The same common sense applies to the internet, and few people are aware of the immense vulnerability you expose yourself to by NOT protecting yourself online. A VPN service does not replace anti-virus protection, firewalls, or common sense, but it does add an extra layer of protection between your data and the world wide web.

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a computer network that is layered on top of an underlying computer network. The “Private” in VPN is the reason we started PathVPN, and means that the data traveling is not generally visible or is encapsulated from the underlying traffic. This creates what Security Professionals call a “tunnel.” In essence, when you log in to our VPN service, you are tunneling through the internet with an extra level of protection between your data traffic and the rest of the internet.

Using a VPN service, your activities or website traffic, or whatever you are doing on the internet is not visible to anyone on the internet between you and the VPN service. The VPN service CAN see your activity, which is why it is SO important to use a VPN service you can trust; one which will not be sniffing your traffic.