In addition to protecting your privacy, VPN services are also commonly used for BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer traffic, as many ISPs have expressed dissatisfaction with file sharing. VPNs are also used to stream video through services like Netflix and Hulu in areas where they are not legally available. In recent years, video streaming services have taken steps to prevent their traffic from being routed through VPNs.
While you can set up your own VPN server, such as OpenVPN on Ubuntu, this is too much of a hassle for most people. Your employer may provide VPN services to remote users. If so, see if you can use them from home.
For most people, the answer is to use a VPN service. ISPs allow you to create a VPN between your gadgets and the Internet. When you access the Internet through their VPN servers, your traffic has no indication of who you are or where you are connecting from.
There is one fundamental problem with VPN services: can turkey whatsapp data sure that they are not tracking your activities? Some VPNs keep their own records of what you do online. If privacy is really important to you, check your VPN's terms of service and policies to see if it keeps a log of your online activity. If so, look for another VPN.
Some VPNs do more than just log your browsing activity, and they do something far more shady. In 2015, free VPN service Hola was found to be selling its users' bandwidth to customers who paid for its Luminati service.
Before signing up for a VPN service, you should also know that you can almost certainly expect your internet connection speed to slow down. This is because you will be sharing your VPN broadband connection with other users. As always, your internet connection can only be as fast as its slowest link.
The vast majority of VPN services require you to install an app on your device. Many, but not all, support Android and iOS, so you can protect your mobile traffic.