Mobile phones and tablets have made online life outside the home pretty easy. A little too easy, in fact, because it’s simple for malicious individuals to hack into your phone if you’re not careful. You won’t be the first to lose your login details because you logged into a public Wi-Fi network or did some online banking on a hotel network that turned out not to be the hotel’s but a clever hacker who set up another Wi-Fi network with a name similar to your hotel’s.
What can you do about this? First, it is always advisable not to use any public Wi-Fi network because they are straightforward for malicious parties to take over. And of course, you can be selective about what you do online if you do log into a public network. Search for a restaurant, don’t text your PIN to your partner, that kind of thing.
If you use a VPN, advertisers have no idea who you are or what you like, so they leave you alone.
To start with the protection: a VPN masks your internet signal by encrypting it. That masked signal is also redirected to a VPN server that cannot be linked to the location of your phone. If you log into a hotel network that isn’t actually the hotel’s, a hacker won’t be able to do anything with your signal. They won’t know where it comes from, who the data belongs to, and they won’t be able to read the encrypted messages. Useless!
A second advantage is that cookies don’t work. Cookies are small files that advertisers use to track what you search for online, allowing them to offer personalized ads. If you use a VPN, advertisers have no idea who you are or what you like, so they leave you alone. No more two months of spam from that one restaurant in Paris that you searched for on your phone for five minutes!
And the benefits? VPN allows you to shop anonymously and pay local prices in online stores, whether you live in the region of the offer or not. This has to do with how VPN works. It masks your smartphone’s internet signal and, as it were, creates a tunnel around your connection that no one from the outside can see through. By masking it (your smartphone is assigned a different, temporary, and untraceable IP address), it is unclear to anyone what that anonymous user is doing and who exactly is online at that moment. For example, travel agency computers only register that someone from the region wants to buy a plane ticket, not whether that person is actually in the region at the time of purchase, which means that all local discounts apply!
