Hunteressentials297

If you have to ask: ‘do I need a VPN for this problem?’, the answer is no, most of the time.

1. Why You Need Site Search Tool
2. Why You Need Site Search Engines
3. Why You Need Search Engine Optimization
4. Why You Need Site Search Engine
5. Why You Need Site Search History

Let us forget the ‘Family Online Safety' TV inserts and the thirteen ‘Best Fastest Secure VPN’ ads on a single search result page. They exist to answer this question with a loud “yes, definitely, all the time”. They also want you to stop looking for the correct solution.

Commercial VPNs are not useful or not alone sufficient for:

• providing better security when ‘working from home’
• achieving anonymity
• defending yourself from hackers (“Mr. Robot”) when at home
• solving all privacy issues, like unwanted profiling by social networks or search engines
• protecting your passwords
• hiding your mobile phone location (GPS)
• helping you avoid data breaches on services you use online
• defending against “cyber threats” and identity theft
• preventing your medical information or family photos getting in the wrong hands

WordPress also notifies you when there is a new version of WordPress available, so you can update your site by simply clicking a button. To protect your data from any accident or hacking, you can easily use a WordPress backup plugin to automatically create backups and store them safely on a remote location. You need to know the name of a site to visit it. This is the trickiest part about navigating the Dark Web. If you must search on the Dark Web, one engine does show some Tor-compatible websites.

Do you see these issues popping up in ads for leading VPN brands? No surprise.

People want quick assurance and safety. Just give me a one-step solution and let’s consider the matter solved. Old-school locks keep people from going through your basement door and they are easy to use, yet burglars can break in the windows. Face masks can protect you and others in a pandemic, but if you shake hands and touch your eyes, they become useless. The promise of one service to solve all information security and privacy issues sounds comforting - but it does not exist.

Hundreds of VPN companies exploit the need for safety by pushing their solutions as a cure-all for various digital ailments. “Protecting your privacy” or “securing your data” are frequently not their primary motivations. In the pursuit of growth and profits, they desperately need new problems to solve with an existing solution. There is serious money in exploiting fear, uncertainty and doubt, and the barrier of entry to this game is very low.

Why You Need Site Search Tool

A lot has changed in the past 10 years. Using a VPN then protected you from the most pressing privacy and security threats online. Websites logging your visits and ISPs monitoring your browsing history were principal issues. Attacks on privacy through undisclosed or unconsented data collection are more pervasive now. Social sites, data brokers and ad networks are all after your intimate personal details; the list of companies building a profile of you is much longer.

Regarding security issues, one often overlooked fact is a VPN only encrypts your connection between your device and the providers server. This protects you from rogue Wi-Fi operators, ISPs with malicious intent or hackers on the same network. Your data, however, gets decrypted when leaving the server and reaches further nodes in the network as secures as it was when it entered the VPN network.

On the brighter side, the level of default encryption for your connection and data traveling on the internet has improved. Most websites use HTTPS by default (indicated by that padlock in your browser’s address bar). DNS over HTTPS, providing further protection against eavesdropping by encrypting DNS requests, is rolled out in browsers. These developments limit the possibilities for snooping, even if you don’t use a VPN. They do not make such services useless, but further put ‘VPNs are indispensable for online security’ claims into question.

Most VPN companies refuse to educate their customers about the limitations of their service. They don’t just ignore developments detrimental to the ‘marketability’ of their product, they claim VPNs solve a whole set of new, unrelated issues. The same lock for your basement door secures your whole house and prevents strangers peeking through the window. Sometimes, turning the key can make you and all your belongings magically disappear.

Companies making such claims not only fail to fulfill their stated mission of securing your data and privacy. They harm by offering a false sense of security. Getting people to pay 30 bucks for a lifetime access to The Security Button is easy. Building trust through transparency, educating customers on threat models and suggesting complementary tools for better protection are hard. These steps are essential, however, as a VPN alone won’t provide complete security, perfect privacy and will certainly not make you anonymous.

So when do you need a VPN?
“Never use them”, warn some, disillusioned with VPN providers and their practices. We believe that is a misstatement. Commercial VPNs can be useful if you use them for specific jobs they can help with. These are:

1. Keeping some control over your privacy. They hide your real IP address from websites you visit and peer-to-peer nodes you connect to. It also prevents ISPs and mobile network operators from tracking the domains and IPs you visit.
2. Protecting your connection from ‘Man in the Middle’ and other common attacks on networks you don’t trust. Useful when connected to Wi-Fi in airports, hotels, cafes and libraries.
3. Circumventing censorship or geographical blocks on websites and content. Some VPNs can help you retrieve information and media otherwise inaccessible.

That’s it.

One last note: please remember that if you use a commercial VPN, your internet traffic goes through the VPN provider’s network. Whoever is in control of the servers can see and log anything you do online, if they choose to. You better trust the service you are signing up for - we will get to that in a future post of VPN Worst Practices.

Disclaimer: This post addresses commercial VPNs marketed for ‘regular users’. Corporate VPNs set up by organizations for their staff serve a different purpose; use them when required by your company. This post is not applicable for users with non-regular threat models: journalists, activists living under repressive regimes, or anyone at risk of being targeted by resourceful individuals or state actors. If any of that applies to you, you need a VPN as part of your security and privacy toolkit. We recommend starting here and using tools recommended by PrivacyTools.io to protect yourself.

Useful resources in this matter (not always correct):
https://schub.wtf/blog/2019/04/08/very-precarious-narrative.html
https://drewdevault.com/2019/04/19/Your-VPN-is-a-serious-choice.html
https://krebsonsecurity.com/tag/vpn/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY (we are happy to sponsor your video, Tom)

Screencap sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXwX-VTJoFw - archived version
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/IU7h/nordvpn-terrible-at-secrets - archived version
https://www.ispot.tv/ad/IlT0/nordvpn-online-privacy-made-easy-299 - archived version
https://www.facebook.com/192711594106057/videos/726462231019564/

To get a better handle on search engine optimization, it’s important to understand why people use search engines, at all. Generally, people use search engines for one of three things: research, shopping, or entertainment. Someone may be doing research for restoring their classic car. Or looking for a place that sells parts for classic cars. Or just looking to kill time with video that shows custom cars racing.

Using search engines for research

Most people who are using a search engine are doing it for research purposes. They are generally looking for answers or at least to data with which to make a decision. They’re looking to find a site to fulfill a specific purpose. Someone doing a term paper on classic cars for their Automotive History 101 class would use it to find statistics on the number of cars sold in the United States, instructions for restoring and customizing old cars, and possibly communities of classic car fanatics out there. Companies would use it in order to find where their clients are, and who their competition is.

Search engines are naturally drawn to research-oriented sites and usually consider them more relevant than shopping-oriented sites, which is why, a lot of the time, the highest listing for the average query is a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is an open-source online reference site that has a lot of searchable information, tightly cross-linked with millions of back links. Wikipedia is practically guaranteed to have a high listing on the strength of its site architecture alone. Wikipedia is an open-source project, thus information should be taken with a grain of salt as there is no guarantee of accuracy. This brings you to an important lesson of search engines — they base “authority” on perceived expertise. Accuracy of information is not one of their criteria: Notability is.

Why You Need Site Search Engines

Using search engines to shop

Why You Need Search Engine Optimization

A smaller percentage of people, but still very many, use a search engine in order to shop. After the research cycle is over, search queries change to terms that reflect a buying mindset. Terms like “best price” and “free shipping” signal a searcher in need of a point of purchase. Optimizing a page to meet the needs of that type of visitor results in higher conversions for your site. Global search engines such as Google tend to reward research oriented sites, so your pages have to strike a balance between sales-oriented terms and research-oriented terms.

This is where specialized engines come into the picture. Although you can use a regular search engine to find what it is you’re shopping for, some people find it more efficient to use a search engine geared directly towards buying products. Some Web sites out there are actually search engines just for shopping. Amazon, eBay, and Shopping.com are all examples of shopping-only engines. The mainstream engines have their own shopping products such as Google Product Search (formerly called Froogle) and Yahoo! Shopping, where you type in the search term for the particular item you are looking for and the engines return the actual item listed in the results instead of the Web site where the item is sold. For example, say you’re buying a book on Amazon.com. You type the title into the search bar, and it returns a page of results. Now, you also have the option of either buying it directly from Amazon, or, if you’re on a budget, you can click over to the used book section. Booksellers provide Amazon.com with a list of their used stock and Amazon handles all of the purchasing, shipping, and ordering info. The same is true of Yahoo! Shopping and Google Product Search. And like all things with the Internet, odds are that somebody, somewhere, has exactly what you’re looking for. The following figure displays a results page from Google Product Search.

Using search engines to find entertainment

Why You Need Site Search Engine

Research and shopping aren’t the only reasons to visit a search engine. The Internet is a vast, addictive, reliable resource for consuming your entire afternoon, and there are users out there who use the search engines as a means of entertaining themselves. They look up things like videos, movie trailers, games, and social networking sites. Technically, it’s also research, but it’s research used strictly for entertainment purposes. A child of the 80s might want to download an old-school version of the Oregon Trail video gameonto her computer so she can recall the heady days of third grade. It’s a quest made easy with a quick search on Google. Or if you want to find out what those wacky young Hollywood starlets are up to, you can turn to a search engine to bring you what you need.

Why You Need Site Search History

If you’re looking for a video, odds are it’s going to be something from YouTube, much like your research results are going to come up with a Wikipedia page. YouTube is another excellent example that achieves a high listing on results pages. They’re an immensely popular video-sharing Web site where anyone with a camera and a working e-mail address can upload videos of themselves doing just about anything from talking about their day to shaving their cats. But the videos themselves have keyword-rich listings in order to be easily located, plus they have an option that also displays other videos. Many major companies have jumped on the YouTube bandwagon, creating their own channels (a YouTube channel is a specific account). Record companies use channels to promote bands, and production companies use them to unleash the official trailer for their upcoming movie.