You may have already seen our Phantom VPN ad, and there’s a good chance that you’ve heard the term crop up in conversation many times, but you aren’t quite sure what it’s all about. Your friends and perhaps even your own kids are using it, and you keep hearing them go on about how useful it is. This leaves you feeling left out. So – what is a VPN and what can it do for you?
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and, as the name suggests, it’s a private network that uses a public one – the Internet – with a few extra privacy and encryption features to securely connect remote sites and users. This means the VPN, like Avira Phantom VPN, can be used in a wide variety of ways. But what are they exactly?
Imagine that you have a friend who’s leaving the country for an extended, well-deserved vacation. Let’s call him Tom. Tom has worked long and hard enough to afford a trip to a hot country with beautiful sandy beaches. But he doesn’t want to switch off completely and be offline the entire time. This is why he’s always armed with his laptop and smartphone. Tom is always up to speed on what’s going on back at the office, and he can also go shopping online while on vacation as well as enjoy his favorite series and sports shows. Because he uses a VPN, he can surf the Internet safely and securely using a public WiFi network – all while enjoying a margarita.
Let’s have a closer look at Tom’s activities:
- Tom keeps his business information from being stolen while traveling overseas. After all, his business is ultimately nobody else’s. He can use his credit/debit card in other countries to shop online, even connecting to the server based back at home as a VPN hides just about everything.
- Tom doesn’t have any problems using a public WiFi network as he has a secure VPN. Now, the barista in the coffee shop he’s at or the lonely person sitting next to his table won’t know more about Tom’s personal life than his own family. Thankfully, unlike a browser-based Virtual Private Network, a VPN goes beyond your web browsing activities to secure all your traffic – not only the data originating from the browser. Tom’s activities are covered whatever device he’s using.
- Tom wants to watch his favorite sports show while at the hotel – and thanks to a VPN he can do this easily. Instead of getting the usual “This video is unavailable in your country” as the website has geo-restrictions, he can enjoy the show at his leisure as the VPN network makes this possible, provided the country’s IP address is available. This means the website treats Tom as if he were at home, even though he’s in another country.
This is just a taster of what a VPN such as Avira Phantom VPN can do for Tom – and also for you. We all live in a world where we are under constant surveillance, but we now have the power to limit what these prying eyes can see. Privacy isn’t a vain hope – it’s the right of every Internet user.
