VPN Myths and Claims

As I said in the last article, a VPN does one thing:

encrypt the traffic leaving your computer, and decrypt it again somewhere on the internet.

But the manufacturers make all sorts of claims about their effectiveness, enough that you might be led to believe they’re near-magical solutions to every cyber-security issue you’ve ever lost sleep over. So let’s dig in.

Claim - Keeps your data private

True - with a caveat.

As we discussed in the last article, no-one at the coffee shop or your office can see what you’re doing. But the VPN operator can, and so can anyone in between them and the final destination. Now almost all of that is encrypted, so it’s still not readable, but there is a potential for some data to leak.

Claim - Helps you avoid phishing, scams, and malware.

Mostly true.

Some VPNs (though not all) will check a site you’re about to visit to see if it’s on a block list. Users report bad websites all the time, and web crawlers go out looking for trouble. That data can be used to help protect you against those sites, by popping up a warning before you get there.

However, many modern browsers have this functionality built in, so you don’t need another service to provide it. And it’s only as good as the data it receives — someone has to be the first one to find a bad site. So it might give you a false sense of security. Always check if a website seems legit, don’t trust any tools you might have installed to do your thinking for you.

Claim - Defeat censorship.

True.

There’s a reason regimes like China block the use of VPNs, they can be used to route around censorship blocks. I’m not going to get into whether this is moral or not (and it’s almost always illegal) but it’s true that countries can’t block what they can’t see. If you exit the VPN in, say, Panama then any rules your own nation has put in place about blocking access to certain sites can’t affect you.

Claim - Stream content not available in your own country.

Partially true.

If a website thinks you’re connecting from another country, it might allow you access to that country’s resources. Some US sites have blocked EU visitors to avoid having to comply with GDPR for example. Services like Netflix, Hulu, etc have different libraries in different nations because of licensing deals, and so a UK viewer gets different shows to a US viewer. Or you might be travelling, and want to watch something you can only see from your home country.

However many of those services also block VPNs — the IP addresses they use are well known — and so you might find that you can’t access it at all. It can sometimes work, and then the next day it won’t.

Claim - Access local pricing.

Mostly true.

Some websites charge different fees for different countries. For example, renting a car in France costs less for a French customer than one connecting from the USA. If you use a VPN to exit in France, you might get the local rate and save money.

But as with the streaming example, some companies are wise to this and either block access or just hike the prices anyway.

Claim - Surf Anonymously

Mostly false.

There is an element of truth behind this claim, which is that certain services will know less about you than they otherwise would. If you get ads with a local element to them, this is done based on where your IP suggests you are. Using an IP in a different country might well confuse those advertisers for a while. But every website you interact with can still build a profile of you, and advertisers aggregate all that knowledge. So before long, they’ll know almost as much as they already did.

Not to mention, you log into websites all the time - and they have to know who you are! A VPN isn’t going to stop Facebook knowing it’s you. You’re reading your Google Mail, so Google knows it’s you. There are a few advantages to masking your location, but you aren’t suddenly invisible to the world.

Claim - Military-Grade Encryption

Basically meaningless.

Encryption is hard to do well, and some systems are certainly better than others. However no military organisation has a ‘grade’ for encryption, and any of the commercial or open-source methods are more than adequate for anyone.  The security built into your web browser is the same as pretty much every government and military use. Hackers find ways around encryption, they don’t break it, so this is just marketing fluff designed to sound impressive.

Claim - Advertisement and tracker blocking

True with a caveat.

This is usually achieved by a plug in installed in the browser, which is something you can do for free without a VPN also. It’s a nice additional feature, though, and probably does more to protect your privacy than the VPN alone can.

Read on to find out the best way to find a great VPN for yourself – or just follow my lead and get NordVPN.

And finally, Tom Scott does a great job of explaining the dubious claims of VPNs in just a few minutes.

(These claims are all genuine ones made on various VPN service websites.)