- #DO I NEED AN VPN FOR MY MAC HOW TO#
- #DO I NEED AN VPN FOR MY MAC FREE#
- #DO I NEED AN VPN FOR MY MAC MAC#
Antivirus can help block phishing sites, but it helps to take a skeptical eye to the sites you visit.īeyond phishing, perhaps the most dangerous attack the average person could encounter is an account takeover. Many VPNs provide some phishing protection, but these malicious sites are ephemeral and vanish as quickly as they appear. If you enter your login information for the real onto a phishing site made to look like PayPal, some bad guy somewhere has your credentials. Some attackers don't even bother with malware, and instead craft ingenious phishing websites designed to trick you into voluntarily handing over personal information. The best antivirus provides some protection against novel attacks that simply aren't known and can guard against malware that sneaks onto your computer from sources other than dangerous websites. Some VPNs watch for known malicious sites, but you should still protect your machine with antivirus. Which is not to say that VPNs are worthless, but rather that you'll be better protected if you know how best to use a VPN.Ī VPN is first and foremost for protecting your privacy, not guarding against malicious sites or malware. A VPN just safeguards your Mac's web traffic. Unfortunately, there isn't a magic suit of armor for your computer that protects it from all the world's attacks. Keep in mind, however, that VPNs and streaming services are locked in a cat-and-mouse struggle, so a VPN that works today may be blocked tomorrow. For this reason, Netflix and other streaming services work very hard to block access to VPN users. If you live in the US and tunnel to a VPN server in London, you could watch Netflix content that's only available in the UK. This same property of a VPN can be used for far more mundane purposes, like accessing streaming content that's available in other countries. It's a vitally important role, but we don't evaluate VPNs on their ability to bypass censorship, since our getting it wrong could have catastrophic consequences for our readers. Journalists and activists have used this property of VPNs to bypass the restrictions put in place by repressive governments. If you connect to a VPN server in Canada, you'll appear to be browsing the web from somewhere in the great white north.
You can also use a VPN to spoof your location by connecting to a distant VPN server. Advertisers and anyone else interested in monitoring online activities have a harder time tracking you while the VPN is active. That's handy, since an IP address can be used to track your movements across the web, and to discern your approximate location. Because your traffic appears to originate from the VPN server (not your Mac), an outside observer can only see the IP address of the VPN server. VPNs help protect your privacy in other ways, too. VPNs do hide more of your data, however, and protect your DNS requests, denying ISPs even that insight into your activities. It's true HTTPS does prevent observers from intercepting your information. There's a strong argument that the widespread adoption of HTTPS already protects your data, and VPNs are overkill.
Most of us already fork over a hefty chunk of change to our ISPs, but now those same companies are trying to profit off their customers by selling anonymized user data. That's handy for anyone who needs to make use of public Wi-Fi networks, since it's not always clear who owns those networks and even whether it's safe to connect.Ī VPN shields your online activity from internet service providers (ISPs). The encrypted connection prevents anyone on the same local network as you-and even the person who runs the network-from getting any information about what you do online. All of your web traffic is sent through this encrypted connection, exits the server, and then rejoins the internet as normal.
#DO I NEED AN VPN FOR MY MAC MAC#
When you switch on a VPN, it creates an encrypted connection between your Mac and a remote server operated by the VPN company.
#DO I NEED AN VPN FOR MY MAC HOW TO#
#DO I NEED AN VPN FOR MY MAC FREE#
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