You Should Be Traveling with a VPN

CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset.
CAIRA: I'm Caira Blackwell.
ROSIE: I'm Rosie Guerin. And you're listening to The Wirecutter Show .
CHRISTINE: This episode is called You Should Be Traveling With a VPN. Hey there, it's Christine Summer is rolling in and lots of people are probably making big summer travel plans and some of you might be going abroad. Today we're going to do a special mini episode about something that might help keep you and your information's safe while you're gallivanting about the world VPNs, which stand for virtual private network. If you're like me, you might be like, what does this mean? I don't understand this, but we're going to get into it in this episode because a VPN can be really helpful for keeping your information secure while you are web browsing.
In just a second, Caira is going to chat with Max Eddy, a staff writer who covers privacy and security here at Wirecutter. He's been featured on another bonus episode of ours, about 23 and Me a few months back, and this week he's going to talk with Caira about what you need to know about a VPN, why it might be helpful and why you should probably have one if you're traveling overseas, we'll be right back.
CAIRA: Welcome back. I'm here with Max Eddy, who is a staff writer who's covered privacy and security for over a decade, and now he's here to chat with me about VPNs. Max, welcome to the show.
MAX: It's great to be here.
CAIRA: I'm so excited to have you on, especially because I don't know much about VPNs. So could you tell us what exactly is a VPN? Explain it to me like I'm five.
MAX: Sure, sure. So a VPN is a service, so you're going to need to buy a subscription. It's usually monthly, but you can find shorter term or longer term. And once you've purchased a subscription, you're going to want to install the application on your phone or laptop. The application is actually going to handle all the setup for you, so that's how you're going to interact with it. You open the app and from there you'll be able to turn the VPN connection on and off and select different locations to route your traffic.
When you turn the VPN on, it does a few things to your web traffic, so all of the web traffic from your phone, from your browser, from applications, talking to the internet in the background, email, all that stuff is routed through an encrypted connection to a server that's operated by the VPN company.
And that connection between your machine and the server is encrypted in such a way that your internet service provider, anyone who's trying to observe your traffic, cannot see what you're doing. And that protects your privacy on that end, and by routing it out through this server, that means it's harder for anyone watching your activities out on the web to connect that back to you. So let's say they, the omnipotent spying they is looking at a website and they see a little blip on it, that's your traffic, and they try to track it back. They're just going to see it coming from the VPN server and not from your computer. So it allows you to both change where your data appears to be coming from by selecting a different server in different location, but importantly, it protects your device. It sort of makes it seem that your traffic is somewhere else. We're trying to prevent observers from being able to correlate that information together.
CAIRA: So why would you use a VPN?
MAX: So a VPN can help improve your online privacy in a couple of different ways. Advertisers will have a harder time tracking you and your ISP, your internet service provider can't see what you're doing and when you're traveling, it means you can sometimes use streaming services or websites as if you were still at home.
CAIRA: Right, right. I like using it if I'm in Canada and you usually can't use HBO Max somewhere than if you have a VPN located in New York. You can still use HBO Max, right?
MAX: Sometimes.
CAIRA: Sometimes it doesn't work all the time. So then why don't people just use VPNs all the time?
MAX: Well, because most of your traffic is already encrypted and you have to pay for a VPN, so you really would end up paying for another subscription on top of your internet service provider subscription. The other reason is that it does slow down your internet connection and VPN companies have gotten better about this, but it is always going to have an impact on it, especially if you're connecting to a VPN server that's further away. So if you're in New York and you're pretending to be in California, it's going to be much slower than if you were connected to a VPN server in New York.
CAIRA: So to make it a little bit more grounded in the real world, what are some examples of people who might want to use a VPN at home or abroad?
MAX: So at home, someone might want to use a VPN if they really don't want their ISP to see what they're doing. Your internet service provider can see everything that you're doing, and legally they can sell that data. And I think also people who are just very concerned about trying to reduce their exposure to advertising trackers to pretty much anyone out there who is trying to observe your movements online. I think that's from the privacy perspective. From a usability perspective, there are people who might be trying to access streaming or some kind of online service that's only available in a particular region. You can do that with a VPN sometimes. But really when we look at VPNs, we look at them as a privacy product. This is what you're using it for.
CAIRA: And then if you are abroad, what is a normal person going to use a VPN for abroad?
MAX: So I think the most normal thing to use it while you're abroad is just a little bit more peace of mind when you're traveling in an area where you might not know what the privacy laws are like you might not know anything about the region, you might not ever be coming back either. So it's a little bit more peace of mind. It can make things a little bit easier while you're traveling. And most importantly though, I think the more practical thing that people are going to use a VPN for abroad is to access services that are only available at home. So if I am out in another country and I want to watch show on my favorite streaming platform, I might want to use a VPN so that I can appear to be in the US and doing that. Again, that doesn't always work, but there's lots of other services like you might want to be connecting to your bank or even just using the regular internet as if you were at home. That can be localized to your own language if you try to access Google somewhere else, it's not going to be in English probably. So there's a couple of reasons why you might want to do that.
CAIRA: When I was in college, I studied abroad in Shanghai and they required us to have VPNs on our phones and our laptops because the government centers so much stuff.
MAX: Anyone who's in a position where they feel like they might be targeted by a repressive government, a minoritized person, a journalist, an activist, that makes sense for them to use VPNs, and your example of being in Shanghai is a really great example because that's a situation where there's not only censorship where you need to use a VPN to connect to sites that would be unavailable where you are, but also because there's known to be a lot of surveillance and if you're trying to avoid or really mitigate that to some extent, that's an important thing to use a VPN for.
CAIRA: Totally. So when people might be considering getting a VPN, what should they look for? What do you look for?
MAX: So the most important thing I look at with VPNs is their commitment to transparency because a VPN, if it wanted to, could monitor its servers and see all the traffic that all of its users are accessing, and that's not good. So one thing we also look for is recent third-party audits. When I look at VPNs, I want to see that they're making some kind of commitment to security and privacy and that they're following their own policies. Obviously audits are not perfect, but they're a good tool to evaluate that. And you want to have a strong privacy policy. The company should be able to explain to you what data they're collecting and why and what they're doing to protect you and a transparency report if possible. That's a accounting of how many requests from law enforcement the company has received and how they responded to them.
CAIRA: Oh.
MAX: You want to see that as low as possible. And we also want to see companies that aren't leaning into fear, uncertainty and doubt in their marketing. Like I said earlier, VPNs are tricky because they do what they say they're going to do, but whether or not they make sense for you is going to depend on your particular situation and companies that try to convince you that you need this to survive. We don't think that's fair.
CAIRA: Okay. So if it's really blasting, either you're being surveilled all the time, you definitely need this VPN because it's going to protect you, maybe don't trust that?
MAX: Yeah.
CAIRA: Okay. So that does sound like a lot of criteria. Did any of these VPNs that you tested actually cover all of that?
MAX: Absolutely. And one of the things we do look at too is affordability and Mullvad VPN is a great choice for affordability. It's only $5 a month, a little over $5 a month, and they don't require you to reveal much personal information when you sign up. It's an interesting system, a little bit hard to get used to, but it's really convenient and it's a great way to protect your privacy. The only issue that we've ever had with Mullvad is that it only has servers in 50 countries. That should be fine for most people, but if you need to be in a specific country with your VPN server and it's not there, then that could be an issue.
CAIRA: So do you have a recommendation just for people who only want a VPN when they're traveling abroad?
MAX: Yeah, IVPN is cheap, easy to use. It does have some limitations, but it's great for traveling because they have very low cost, short-term subscriptions. So you can get a week subscription for just $2. So short trip, short VPN subscription.
CAIRA: That's lovely. And do you have to put in a lot of information to sign up for IVPN?
MAX: No, you don't. They have a pretty similar system.
CAIRA: Oh, so it's quick, easy and cheap?
MAX: Yeah.
CAIRA: Amazing. Can you walk me through how I might go about picking a VPN? If I'm planning on traveling abroad, what does that decision tree look like?
MAX: So first off, you're going to want to go and take a look at our guide at Wirecutter because we have not just our top picks, but a number of other ones that we think are good and situations where you might want to use them.
First and foremost, people need to look at the cost. The average price of a VPN is about $10 a month. If it's more expensive than that, it needs to be offering you something extra in order to justify that cost. And like I said, you want to look at what assurances they're making you about their transparency, their security. You want to take a look at their privacy policy. They should be able to explain to you why they're safe to use. If you need to be in a particular region, you want to look on their website and see what servers they offer. Most VPNs will cover most major locations. That's pretty common. In terms of value. You want to make sure that you're getting it two to five devices depending on how much you're paying. So the low cost IVPN, week long subscription I mentioned that limits you to just two devices at the same time. Usually you can get up to five devices at the same time. So if you wanted to say, have one VPN account for two laptops, two phones, and then another device that'll have you all covered.
CAIRA: Like a family plan?
MAX: Yeah, exactly. You can actually get significantly more depending on how much you're willing to pay. Ideally, you should be able to select a server location manually, but especially if you're traveling, you're probably going to want to be routing your traffic to a specific location. So you want to look for a service that will let you do that.
CAIRA: Can you briefly explain how you actually tested VPNs?
MAX: Most of the time when I do VPN testing, I'm testing from where I live. And that's very limiting, right? Because your experience of using a VPN is going to be very dependent upon your internet connection, how far you are away from a VPN server and all these other variables. It gets really, really messy, really fast. So for this last round of VPN testing, I got some volunteers from the Wirecutter staff who tested VPNs on their homes at various locations across the country in various situations. So we had people in really rural areas, we had people in big cities, we had people in mid-sized cities and across the country, and we saw some strong trends. But it really underlined that where you are, your personal situation is going to have the biggest impact on whether or not that VPN is going to perform well for you.
And it will be wildly different depending on where you are. So the reason we did this was to underline the advice that we give to people, which is, it's cheaper to buy a VPN at a year-long or longer subscription. It's much, much cheaper to do that, and they want you to do that, but you don't know how it's going to work in your home. So it's better to get the shortest possible subscription or use the free version of it if that's possible. Try it out at your home, see how it works, and if it even makes sense for the thing you're trying to accomplish. And if it does, then you can go ahead and sign up for that longer subscription.
CAIRA: So let's say that you've traveled, you're back home. What do you do when you're done with a VPN? Does it just stay on your phone forever?
MAX: If you no longer need a VPN, you should turn it off, uninstall it, and cancel your subscription. Because when you're connected to a VPN, it's always going to have an impact on your internet speeds. And that's because it's usually adding more distance to that. It's really easy to forget that it's on. So take a look in the application, see if you're still connected, disconnect, and then look in settings, make sure it's not automatically connecting. If you don't want it to be doing that, get rid of it. Live a great life.
CAIRA: Do you think there's anything else that the curious novice might want to know about VPNs?
MAX: There are some free VPNs out there that we actually do trust. Proton VPN does not limit your data for its free subscribers, but it does limit your locations. TunnelBear has a free subscription option that does limit your data, but not locations. So depending on what you're trying to do, one of those might be really good.
Tor I should really mention it, is a much more robust privacy option that is free, but it is absolutely going to slow down your connection a lot more. Most people don't need to use VPNs all the time. It is a valuable tool that can solve a problem, but it only makes sense if it's one problem you're trying to solve. So if you don't want your ISP to see what you're doing, or you need to be in a specific location and a VPN is a really useful tool, but to make a really strong impact on your personal security, you should be using a password manager and enabling 2FA wherever you can.
CAIRA: What is 2FA?
MAX: Two-factor authentication. It makes it much harder for an attacker to take over your account even if they already have your password.
CAIRA: So in a perfect world, you should have a password manager, a two-factor authentication, and a VPN when you're traveling abroad?
MAX: I don't even think that's a perfect world. I think that's just the world we should live in.
CAIRA: I like that answer. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Max, for coming and talking to me about VPNs.
MAX: Thank you so much.
CHRISTINE: If you want to find out more about Wirecutter's coverage on VPNs or if you want to check out the specific VPNs we recommended today, go to our website or check out our show notes. Thanks so much for listening. See you.
CAIRA: The Wirecutter Show is executive produced by Rosie Guerin and produced by Abigail Keel, engineering support from Maddie Massiello and Nick Pittman. Today's episode was mixed by Catherine Anderson. Original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, Elishiba Itoop and Diane Wong. Wirecutter's Deputy Publisher is Cliff Levy. Ben Fruman is Wirecutter's Editor-in-Chief. I'm Caira Blackwell.
CHRISTINE: I'm Christine Cyr Clisset.
ROSIE: And I'm Rosie Guerin.
CAIRA: Thanks for listening.

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