Improve your privacy with a VPN for your Android mobile device
Using your Android phone or tablet on a public Wi-Fi network can be dangerous for several reasons. For example, an incorrectly configured network could expose your data to others. There’s also the possibility that nefarious parties have set up an innocent-looking wireless network specifically to trick you into connecting. Fraudulent networks can be very difficult to distinguish from the real thing, so you should use a virtual private network, or VPN to protect yourself. VPNs are still a good investment even when you know the network is safe. ISPs are allowed to sell anonymized user metadata to advertisers and other third parties. Lots of other companies, like Facebook and Google, hunger for a piece of the tasty and lucrative data pie. Speaking of advertisers, they use advanced trackers that correlate your movements between websites. This is still true when you browse the web on your Android device. What’s more, some mobile apps may still transmit data without encryption, letting various three-letter organizations keep an eye on you. You might not think anyone would be interested in your data, but it’s not always individuals who are targeted for surveillance or attack. At the 2016 Black Hat security conference, some 35,000 devices connected to a mysterious Wi-Fi network, all (presumably) without the knowledge of their owners. The network was configured to mimic whatever Wi-Fi request was made of it. You can bet that many of those devices were mobile phones merely seeking a familiar Wi-Fi network. What Is a VPN? When you connect to a VPN, it routes your web traffic through an encrypted connection to a server operated by the VPN company. This means that anyone monitoring your traffic, whether its a Wi-Fi spy or an ISP, won’t be able to see what you’re up to. Out on the web, correlating online activities to you is much harder when you use a VPN. An observer will see all your web traffic (and the traffic of other VPN customers) flowing in and out of the VPN server, not your Android device. Also, when you’re connected to a VPN, your true IP address is hidden. All a snooping advertiser or scurrilous spy will see is the IP address of the VPN server. This protects your privacy but also makes it harder for anyone to discern your location. That’s because IP addresses are distributed geographically, and can sometimes be eerily close to where you are physically located. What a VPN Isn’t As important as it is to understand what a VPN is, it’s also important to know what it isn’t. It isn’t a true anonymization service and you can’t use one to connect to hidden websites on the Dark Web.
