There have been occasions when companies have claimed their service is secure and anonymous and then have been found to have been sharing details. If this is an important feature to you, make sure that the service you choose anonymizes traffic and doesn’t share details of customers with anyone, including law enforcement authorities. It also means it’s much more difficult for hackers, or anyone else, to snoop on your online activity. That means it’s a much more secure way to use the internet, particularly if you’re connected via a public wifi network such as those in coffee shops or airports. In addition, VPNs encrypt the data that travels on their network. You connect to a VPN using a Mac VPN client, usually supplied by the company operating the service. Hence, you can pretend to be in a different location - useful if you need to bypass restrictions place on internet access by your own government or by the website you’re connecting to. Most VPN services have servers in multiple geographic locations and the one you choose to connect to will determine which country the website or service you’re visiting thinks you’re coming from. Instead of connecting to your ISP’s servers and then from there to a website, you bypass your ISP an connect to the VPN server and from there to the online destination. The easiest way to think of it is as a tunnel between you and whatever online service or website you’re visiting. VPN is an abbreviation of a virtual private network. There are a number of VPN services available, both free and paid for, but they vary in lots of ways, including price and the features they offer. This allows you to view streaming video services that are only available in your home country while you’re traveling, or watch services like Netflix that are intended for a different country - so, for example, if you live in Europe you could watch the US version of Netflix.

VPNs or virtual private networks have become hugely popular in the last few years, thanks in part to the way that they allow you to mask your locations.

To help you get the most of your online interactions, we’ve prepared some handy ideas and practices below. Whether you want to access more content in one tap, encrypt the connection, watch any streaming service or get full online privacy - ClearVPN is here for you.

So here’s a tip for you: Download ClearVPN, and try out ready-made shortcuts.

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