Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
All about VPN’s with Gaya Polat from vpnMentor
Protect your digital privacy with Silent Pocket’s product line of patented Faraday bags, phone cases, and wallets which will make your devices untrackable, unhackable and undetectable. Use discount code “sharedsecurity” to receive 15% off of your order during checkout. Visit silentpocket.com today to take advantage of this exclusive offer.
Tom Eston: Joining me on the podcast to discuss VPNs is Gaya Polat from vpnMentor. Welcome, Gaya.
Gaya Polat: Hello.
Tom Eston: Alright. So first question about VPNs is, maybe for our audience that may not be familiar with VPNs, what is a VPN and why should someone use one?
Gaya Polat: A VPN stands for virtual private network. Is a tool that routes your online information through specialized service. What this means is that it routes your traffic and then encrypts your data. So by doing so, VPNs hide your online activity and protect you from the many danger on the web, whether it’s hackers, data selling, identity theft, and more. So using a VPN keeps your online activity private and safe, therefore it minimizes the chance that you’ll be hacked. But there are other reasons people use VPNs. One of the more common reasons people have been using VPNs is to access geo-block content. And the way a lot of content online works, let’s say Netflix or Hulu, they have different catalogs based for different countries and places. So if you’re an American, for example, who now is spending a semester in England or anywhere else, you’re gonna see that your Netflix catalog has changed. So a lot of people have been using VPNs to access content that is blocked.
Gaya Polat: Another very popular reason people have been using VPNs is, sports fans have found VPNs to be quite useful, because a lot of the times like let’s say you want to watch a certain UFC fight on your pay-for-view, it can cost around $80, but there’s a very likely chance that somewhere in a different country, let’s say the United Kingdom, France, or Canada even, you can watch the game on a regular cable channel. So by using a VPN, you can access that quite freely, and before every important boxing or UFC match, you can… We tell you the best way by using a VPN to watch the game or the fight. There’s also a different segment of people who use VPNs because they want to overcome their local censorship laws. Sadly, some countries don’t have free internet and free online access, and they simply need a VPN to use, for example, in Turkey, Wikipedia is blocked. So whenever someone from Turkey wants to access, say, Wikipedia, they need to use a VPN. Russia, almost all online social media is blocked. So we see a lot of users from Russia. That is it. Yeah. Those are I think the main reasons people use VPN.
Tom Eston: Yeah, that’s great. Lots of good things, especially if you’re in a country that may be censored, like you said, or access to different types of entertainment content that may not be available in your region or region of the world. And of course user privacy which is definitely a big one. So having said that, with all the great use cases for a VPN, what are some of the disadvantages that come with using a VPN?
Gaya Polat: So first of all, as you said, there are a lot of advantages to using a VPN, but it’s not a magic potion that you can use and everything will be great. For example, it will not protect you from phishing scams or having your personal data leaked in certain cases. For example, if you entered your personal information to Facebook and that is hacked, even if you use the best VPN, that will not save your private information.
Gaya Polat: There is also an issue with speeds, because by default, what a VPN does
Published on 6 years, 8 months ago