Every site you visit can see your IP address, and it’s possible to both track your habits online (for targeted advertising etc.) and roughly geographically locate you.Ī VPN avoids all of this by diverting your Internet traffic away from your ISP’s servers and sending (or ‘tunnelling’) it through its own servers. It’s also useful to know that your Internet connection has its own IP address, which never changes.

Use a secure VPN for maximum safety online.

Plus, your ISP will record just about everything you do, so if, for example, the government wants to find that out, all it has to do is ask.

If there are rules in place – restrictions on what you can watch, for example – your ISP can block content and stop you from viewing what you want. This also means that your ISP can see exactly what information you are receiving through its servers.

That’s how you can watch videos online that aren’t stored on your device. So, if you’re browsing YouTube on your PC, YouTube will send its data from its own servers to the servers owned by your ISP, which will then send the information to you. Your ISP also has servers which are in charge of directing information to your device. That information is stored on servers, which can be identified by their IP address. When you’re online, your device (that could be a PC, Mac, smartphone, PS4, smart TV, anything really) sends and receives information over an Internet connection provided by your Internet service provider (ISP). If you already know how a VPN works, you can probably skip this introduction, but if not, here’s a simple way of describing their function. How a VPN works can be difficult to explain in simple terms – and that’s why many people can be intimidated by them. (Image credit: Ksenia Zvezdina/Getty Images) VPN – How a VPN works

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