A VPN seems to be a great solution for privacy and/or encrypted connectivity. I was looking for some privacy and decided to try something to avoid showing my ip freely to websites along with a few other measures aimed at protecting myself with privacy settings (now I think those are actually better for you).

What is a VPN

A Virtual Private Network is a bit like what we used to call a proxy, but a bit better than that. VPNs are also well known for being used for remote work as you can join from home the network of your employer. In other words, a VPN is a private network using the Internet instead of wiring or wifis, so you can have a local IP on the other side of the world to connect as if you were there.

When I connect to the internet through my ISP I get an external IP (the IP that’s shown to everyone on the internet) which is usually assigned to you ISP and it relates you to a location and a country. That’d also allow you to self host services on the internet though your IP would probably change every now and then. You also have a local (internal network) IP which identifies your computer inside your network. You probably have one or more notebooks, one or more smartphones, IoT “smart” devices, a Raspberry Pi, a NAS server for movies, an Android TV device. All those things have an IP. When you join a VPN you connect to a network where you have an internal IP within that network and an external IP (the IP internet servers will see, i.e. Netflix). That network can be in your country or elsewhere. Your ISP knows you connected to a VPN server (or maybe a server) but it doesn’t know what you do inside it). When you connect to another website from your VPN, your ISP doesn’t know what you are looking at. That’s a VPN. In the context of individuals, a VPN allows you to get an EXTERNAL IP from another network that you’d usually pay for (Free VPNs are rare). There are several reasons to get one but we’ll focus in privacy.

One of the most marketed sale points for VPNs are streaming services but you can also use it to hide from your country’s control or maybe just to connect from your workplace back home or hide your traffic from a public wifi network (i.e. the starbucks in the corner).

So I just wanna show you my experience with:

• A commercial VPN
• A VPS with a VPN connection
• Using TOR

I bought a month of VPN with subscription at a service with wireguard. Wireguard is a protocol that creates a sort of encrypted proxy between you and another machine. It’s kinda easy to install on Linux or BSD nowadays as long as you install wireguard tools and it worked on my phone as well.

The app of this VPN allowed me to:

• Select which apps I wanted to use with the VPN (aka split tunneling)
• Jump over multiple servers to make it harder to guess who I am
• Change the server I wanna use for a session

There are a few downsides:

• if you live in a poorer country or even just in a developing country chances are you don’t have a server to connect nearby which is bad (unless you wanna hide your country from servers or your own identity from your government). In my case, with the provider I tried I had options but not many and I didn’t wanna try other countries because I didn’t wanna lose speed. I just wanted to hide my personal IP.
• Most well known web services like streaming or social networks and even web shopping stores ban or at least flag VPN server IPs and unless your provider changes IPs often, that will make your browsing routine annoying
• Somewhat related to the past point, some people may have used the IP you’re getting to do something sketchy and you could get your beloved account banned for apparently no reason
• You have to trust them (they could hold logs about your traffic)

Hence, there are advantages but also annoyances.

A Free VPN (like Proton) would be a great idea but there aren’t that many and the server options to switch to aren’t great (Proton has servers in my country but not for free and you can switch servers but randomly.

What if I self host one on a VPS?

There’s an easy way for this called PiVPN. They have a website and an automation script that installs Wireguard or OpenVPN for you. There a probably ready images to install PiVPN in a VPS. The slight advantage is:

• Your IP might not be flagged
• You’re not showing your home IP address

However,

• Your VPS is probably tied to you, so it’s still YOUR traffic (if you really wanna hide your activity)
• You can’t switch servers unless you have lots of servers (some VPS hosts allow you to get more IP addresses)
• It’s probably cheaper in the long run to get a VPN to switch servers and a good companion app than many VPSs to host a VPN on each one.

There’s a good use case for PiVPN of course! At home! If you instead of wanting to hide your house IP just wanna access your self hosted raspberry pi or something like that, a VPN would be awesome. If you’re at an office PC, that could work as long as you have little restrictions on usage (that’s not always the case). If you’re lucky you can bypass office firewall filters which is very convenient though might get you in trouble so beware!

Other measures to get privacy

Something very similar in case you don’t wanna use your own IP for certain stuff is using Tor.

Your browser and the services you use can also give you away much fsater than an IP address. For example, if you wanna book a flight. Check your browser settings for privacy issues you might not be addressing and check how dependent you might be from services like Meta, Google or other traceable services.

Conclusion

Are they worth it? VPNs have multiple use cases but certainly many people won’t enjoy in the long term its use unless they have a clear reason. If you wanna torrent stuff maybe that’s a valid use case. If you wanna hide your IP because maybe you could get some privacy you better work on your browsing habits.