Most people are at some level aware that we live in a world that is laced with surveillance. At every corner, virtually and in real life, there always seems to be someone who would like to get their hands on your personal information.
From intelligence agencies to search engines to individual hackers, everyone and their mothers seem keen on knowing more about you and using it for their own benefit. Unfortunately, too often do these information gathering efforts come at our expense in some way shape or form.
This phenomenon is particularly acute amongst the younger members of society, who are the most frequent users of the virtual landscape. Not only do they go online most often out of any age group, but youngsters are also more likely to be more adventurous in their virtual lives, visiting sites that might have a questionable reputation simply out of curiosity.
This is where things such as a school VPN and VPNs in general come into play. VPNs are a great way to protect yourself and your online information and persona. VPNs are a good source of cheap, reliable, and comprehensive online privacy protection.
Keeping Busybodies at Bay
Most people have a decent idea of what a VPN is. Basically, a VPN creates something resembling a separate network and encrypts the user’s exchanges both from and to the device and reroutes them through an alternate IP address that the user chooses from the VPN’s IP address selection.
What this does is that it avails users of online privacy protection whereby no one else besides the user and the VPN server can see the exchanges that take place. This provides the user with a peace of mind knowing that their information remains private and confidential.
Not only does a good VPN protect against potential security breaches, but it also allows the user to conceal their location. Even though third parties cannot see what is in the exchanges because they are encrypted and nearly impossible to decipher, they will be able to see where the exchanges are coming from.
A good VPN solves this issue through the use of alternate IP addresses. VPNs will offer their users the choice of using any one of the servers in their network regardless of where in the world the server happens to be. Users can pick whichever server location they please and it will appear as if they are at that location because that is where the exchanges will now look like they are coming from.
Good VPNs enforce this security even further by having strict no log policies. Protecting your online privacy would not amount to much if your VPN turned around and sold that information to the highest bidder themselves. By having a strict no log policy, good VPNs will not have any records being kept of anyone, which means even in the event of a subpoena, there will be nothing for the courts to look at, ensuring users are resting easy.
Youngsters in School
Younger netizens all around the world tend to use the internet for different things compared to their older counterparts. Some of these include video gaming and academic researching. Both aforementioned activities are greatly assisted with the use of a VPN, namely through the use of alternate IP addresses.
The thing is, many publications that have abandoned their physical presence and gone completely online still rely on streams of revenue to keep them going. The main ones continue to be advertising revenues and subscriptions. When it comes to subscriptions, publications are no longer able to advertise their front page on newsstands like they used to and instead now offer a certain number of free articles to each netizen.
This limit is rather unfortunate for those who seek to stretch every dollar, of which younger people are disproportionately represented in. As it turns out, publications keep track of this in reference to your device’s location as well as model type. But if you had the ability to continuously change your perceived location, this would no longer be a hindrance to you.
If you simply changed your alternate IP address before running out of your free article quota, it would seem as if you were brand new to the publication site and therefore entitled to the set quota of free articles before having to subscribe. What this means is that you can keep deploying different IP addresses to your device and continuously enjoy free articles from these publications in perpetuity.
This is very helpful especially to university students who need to find authoritative citations but would much rather save the subscription money for something else, like an extra packet of ramen noodles. By subscribing to a cheap and good VPN or even a free one, students can have their academic cake and eat it too.
A Brave New World
In this day and age, having the services of a good VPN, regardless of whether or not it is free, is becoming increasingly indispensable. Not only is the virtual landscape increasingly mired with those who would harm you for personal enrichment, but as society becomes more price conscious, using VPNs for international bargain hunting as well as free academic research will only become more common.
Online security is no longer restricted to the realm of intelligence agencies and the uber paranoid among us. This is a real and pressing threat in the modern age and will require modern solutions to be overcome.
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Ben G says
I think there is a serious misunderstanding here: a VPN doesn’t guarantee privacy. All a VPN does is offering an encrypted tunnel to another computer, and when used for web browsing then visited websites will only “see” the other computer and not the one where the requests originate.
However, a VPN does nothing for protecting your personal data. It doesn’t prevent websites from tracking and profiling you, and it doesn’t prevent sensitive, i.e. personal identifiable information, from flowing from your own computer to the ‘net. And last but not least, a VPN does exactly *zero* for users who are voluntarily spreading all kinds of information about themselves across social media and message boards.
On the other hand, a somewhat educated and careful user doesn’t need a VPN to keep personal data confidential.
So the conclusion is that, no, a VPN does not protect children’s privacy, and is merely a fig leaf for a problem that is much better solved by educating children about the dangers of the internet and teach them how to use it responsibly.