For the record, all three of the VPNs The New Oil currently recommends offers the same feature under various names, but regardless that's always a plus worth pointing out. Finally, IVPN offers a built-in firewall that blocks known trackers, ads, and malicious domains. Though of course, the other protocols listed above are still available for those who want something a bit more time-tested or have a different need. I was also pleased to see that Wireguard was their default protocol – which is a recently-developed VPN protocol that’s considered to be faster, lighter, and because the code is so small it’s more easily auditable, which hopefully in the long run will mean less vulnerabilities. (Of course, IVPN is not the only one immune to these bugs, but out of the three we endorse on The New Oil they’re the only one that is consistently ahead of the curve). We have covered numerous stories on Surveillance Report about vulnerabilities in widespread VPN protocols or infrastructure, and nearly every one has noted “IVPN is not vulnerable to this,” usually because they patched their systems months ago or have some other mitigation in place that just so happens to protect against the vulnerability in question. They’d rather lose an educated customer who knows that IVPN won’t solve their problems than dupe a paying customer who won’t get the protection they really need. Their site talks about how they don’t believe in paying for reviews or unethical ads, their commitment to transparency, and as I linked above they even have a website that aims to dispel many of the myths surrounding VPNs and what they can and can’t do – even if it costs them potential customers. For one, they are committed to ethical marketing. IVPN has some really impressive positive aspects. For this reason, I recommend reputable VPNs for any services that are tied to your real identity or sensitive and Tor for random searches or accounts that are not tied to your real identity. If you login to your email and then your Reddit account in the same session, they’re now tied together and you’ve lost your anonymity benefit. Second, Tor loses almost – if not – all of its anonymity once you login to something. For example, many essential services – like banks – block known Tor IP addresses to prevent fraud and abuse, making those services nearly impossible with Tor. Tor is a great service, but it also has some issues that make it the wrong tool for certain situations. It can bypass censorship, stop your ISP from selling your browsing data, help obscure your IP address from tracking and logging, and protect your traffic from certain attacks. Having said all that, I do still consider a VPN to be a useful and recommended part of your privacy and security posture if you can afford one. Likewise, while it can be great to protect your traffic from your ISP or a local cybercriminal, from a security perspective you’re already pretty well covered so long as you enable your browser’s HTTPS-Only mode and make sure you’re using the correct sites instead of spoofed/phishing sites. Changing your IP address is a valuable part of avoiding tracking, but it’s just one way and a VPN won’t protect you against those other methods like browser fingerprinting, tracking pixels, cookies, and more. A VPN these days pretty much only has two purposes: changing your IP address and protecting your traffic from local snoops. Some mainstream providers even make ridiculous, outright-false claims like “it'll make you anonymous” or “it'll protect you from viruses.” In all honesty, while I do believe that VPNs are an essential piece of your privacy strategy, there are many other free or low-cost strategies that will give you significantly more protection. A lot of people really hype VPNs as one of those absolutely, must-have, life-changing things that will solve all your problems. Check out their site “ Do I Need a VPN?”). (Interestingly, IVPN openly shares this opinion. After reaching the provider's server, your traffic continues on to your desired destination like normal. What is IVPN?Ī VPN – or Virtual Private Network – is a service that creates an encrypted tunnel between the device and the provider's server, protecting all your traffic from prying eyes along the way like your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or whoever owns the router (think public Wi-Fi, for example). You can read all of our guidelines for sponsorships here. Per the terms of this agreement, IVPN does not have any input on our review, but we want to disclose any possible conflicts of interest up front. Disclosure: The New Oil is sponsored by IVPN.
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