Eli5: How do VPNS work and why are they considered safe? Couldnt the network Im connecting to not just read out all my passwords etc.?
In: Technology
I’ll say VPN’s are close to me,
A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. It’s a network in software that exists within network made of hardware. So computers can be physically interconnected, but they can also be logically or virtually interconnected.
In practice, this is how you can configure your laptop so that, regardless of where you are and whose network you’re attached to, it looks, to you, like you’re on your home network. There are all your other computers, your printer, your TV and game consoles. No one else can see them but you when you’re on the airport public WiFi, for example.
It’s how businesses operate, too. I work remote, but my workstation in my home office and my laptop both see their network as though I were in the office. I see all the office shares, the intranet, our servers, all the other workstations…
How it works is all in software. I’ve got a “VPN Tunnel” that routes all my network communication through an encrypted connection to a corporate VPN server, an access point into the corporate network. That means my home network, my ISP, and everyone in between can’t see the contents of my network communication. They can see I’m sending and receiving data to and from the VPN access point, they can see it’s encrypted, and that’s it.
Do they make your browsing safe and secure? ABSOLUTELY NOT. That’s blatantly conflating the utility of what a VPN does. But even if you’re on a VPN, your browser has to reach OUT of the network in order to communicate with that web server over there, it’s irrelevant whether you do that from your computer directly or over a VPN.
God, I know too many people who work with all this stuff…
So tracking and imprinting. Advertising companies use hundreds of different techniques to uniquely identify you, through your browser. Again, this makes the VPN irrelevant, you touched a web server, and your browser is a more complex piece of software than even your operating system. A lot of code is executed on your browser for the web server, and they get all sorts of information back about you. Advertisers can track your browsing across the whole of the internet. This itself is a big long discussion. I can say a whole lot about how they do it, what they do with it, and what they can do with it.
Here’s the thing about VPN services – they’re only as good as their advertising. The reality is different. You don’t control the computers you don’t own. So anything you do through a computer you don’t own, you don’t own that, either. Are these services logging your behavior? Most will say no, but then public records have demonstrated that basically all of them do, and will immediately hand them over if a government agency so much as asks. Because look, if you’re doing something illegal through my VPN server, I want to prove it wasn’t me or my server. Better you than me. Further, VPNs are getting big because people don’t understand what these things are good for. The advertising is misleading because they’re pitching to the ignorant. They have such plausible deniability about misleading claims, it’s astonishing.
> Couldnt the network Im connecting to not just read out all my passwords etc.?
No. And no one gives a shit about you or your computer. Hackers and criminals and corporations don’t care about the individual, they care about the aggregate.
If you think that VPN can hide all your activities on pornhub then think again.
There is always a backlog somewhere on what you are doing.
Most people are using VPN in a wrong way, it was made for remote control working not hiding your kinky stuffs.
to put simply vpn isnt safer its just more privacy. its like being able to have no one know which bar you go to or who you are at the bar, but it doesnt magically prevent you from getting robbed or getting in a fight at the bar.
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