OK. A slightly tongue-in-cheek question, but I'd like to know what people think.
I am fully familiar with the use of a VPN in a corporate setting, and as many of you will know, I've implemented a VPN at the Wimborne Model Town. However, the benefits of those use cases are clear; a network of devices in a remote location may be secured much more effectively than simply by using passwords, etc, and the traffic to and from the network is encrypted. The result; the remote network is private (hence the name). However, I've always looked upon the commercial offerings of VPN services with a pinch of salt. AFAICT, the only private part of the network that they create is the provider's own servers, so the only benefits that I can see are being able to spoof your IP address and having encrypted data to and from your device. On the other hand, the user is granting permissions and privileges to the provider that may be exploited by them, thus reducing security, not improving it. The reason for this query is that we use Bitdefender antivirus on our phones and tablets and this app also includes a VPN service. My wife tried to enable 'Web protection' on her IPadOS tablet and got the response that VPN had to be enabled to do this. On my Android devices, I do not have to do this (in fact, VPN is a separate install). I'd be interested to hear your comments. -- Terry Coles -- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2024-10-01 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:dorset@mailman.lug.org.uk
