Basically what the title says. I don’t get how VPNs can keep me safe when I’m **hypothetically** torrenting. Can’t ISPs or the company owning the copyright track me down if I were to?
In: 30
To understand a VPN, it’s easiest to start with a proxy.
A proxy is something that does an action on your behalf. Like, say you’re below the legal age to buy something in your country, like cigarettes or alcohol. If you tried, at best you’d be asked to leave, at worst you’d be arrested. If you’re crafty, you could find someone who *is* able to go and ask them to go get it for you. As far as anyone can tell at the store where the thing you want is, a random legal person is there to buy something for their own use, so all their checks pass. And anyone watching you will only see you hanging out with some guy. That guy would be your proxy.
Computers can basically do the same thing. Your computer phones up the proxy. Your ISP, who watches everyone you talk to (but not what you’re talking *about*) just sees you communicating with a random PC somewhere. Your proxy then goes to whatever website you’re looking for and grabs what you want. As far as that website is concerned, some random computer asked for the thing, not you. And the proxy gives you what you wanted. Ideally, you bypass all restrictions and no one is the wiser.
It’s not a foolproof system. If it’s well known that your friend likes to buy things and illegally give them to minors, your friend might get banned too. Or anyone watching both of you could easily put two and two together to see what’s really going on. To some extent this is the same for computers–there are lists of IP addresses out there that tell websites which computers are proxies… basically like the sex offenders list, but for computers. They can’t tell who these computers are working for, but they know they’re probably working for *someone*, presumably someone trying to skirt past rules or laws, so these proxies might get banned.
So, VPN. Technically, a VPN is something much more broad and general than simply hiding your Internet traffic. But in the context which you probably care about, a VPN is like an army of proxies for hire. When you connect to a VPN, you get hooked up to a random computer that the VPN company owns, and you use that computer as your proxy. They might even spread all your network requests across many, many proxies, so your messages never look like they’re coming from the same place. It’s be like… instead of sending one guy to go get you smokes, porn mags, and chew from the corner store, you instead send three different guys, one to get the smokes, one to get the magazines, and one to get the chew. The end result is it’s difficult to trace things back to you.
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