It is increasingly common to see how users care about their privacy, although the number is very low compared to all those who still do not care the least about the treatment that large companies do of their data. However, not only large platforms are data sinks.
Internet providers keep track of all our activity, a record that can later be marketed to focus advertising on the user related to a specific IP, a geographical area ... The fastest and easiest solution for protect our browsing and our data goes through uses a VPN.
We have a large number of VPN options on the market, both free and paid. One of them is Hola VPN, one of the services that offers us the best value for money. Before talking about Hola VPN, the first thing we need to know is what is a VPN and what are they for as well as to protect our anonymity on the internet.
What is a VPN
VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. As its name describes well, a VPN is a private network, a private and encrypted end-to-end communication network between the VPN provider's servers and our team so that no one can access it, not even our ISP, so it cannot store a record of our internet activity.
Let's explain it with an example. If you don't use a VPN, your Internet provider knows that you have reached this page, however, if you use a VPN, your IPS cannot know that information, so it does not have access to the traffic that you generate through the Internet.
How Hola VPN works
Regardless of the device where we install Hola VPN, the operation is always the same. The first thing we must do before starting an internet browser and select the country from which we want to make the connection.
If we want access Netflix content in the United States, we must select this country so that when accessing, all available Netflix content in this country is shown. The same happens with HBO, Prime Video, YouTube ...
Supported platforms for Hola VPN
Hola VPN is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera browsers through an extension, with Android, iOS, macOS, Linux, Windows, Xbox, Playstation, routers, Apple TV, Smart TV, Android TV and Fire TV.
Is Hola VPN safe?
Hola VPN offers us 4 plans that we can hire:
- Free plan. This option allows us to use this VPN service completely free of charge, with a data limit, only on one device and does not offer us any kind of privacy (indicates it in description).
- 3 year plan. This is the most appropriate plan if we are convinced that we want to hire a VPN for the day-to-day, since the monthly fee is just under 3 euros per month paying the 3 years in advance.
- 1 year plan. If we only want to hire one year, the monthly price is a little less than 7 euros, paying the whole year in advance.
- Monthly plan. If we want to test how Hola VPN works, we can hire a month individually without any commitment for 12,99 euros.
All free VPNs are of absolutely no use to us, at least for the user who wants to maintain their privacy. Instead of collecting navigation data from our operator, these are collected by the VPN service to later trade with them to be able to maintain the servers.
Hola VPN offers us a limited free plan, a plan that does not offer us the privacy we can seek, as we can see in the description of this plan. If we really want privacy, we must opt for one of the different payment plans that it offers us.
If I had to choose a VPN for everyday use, The best option currently available on the market is found at NordVPN, a VPN service used by many professional esports players to both improve connection speed with ping. We just have to wander around Twitch to check it out.
Advantages of a VPN
Prevent our internet provider from tracking us
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, VPNs were born as a solution to tracking governments and / or third parties including internet providers. There are no VPNs like the private mode of browsers. This mode, all it does is do not store information on our computer about our navigation.
Avoid censorship
Some countries like China and Russia that have a tight control over the internet, controlling at all times what type of content its citizens can access from their countries. With a VPN, we can use an IP from another country and access content blocked by the government of the day.
Bypass geographic restrictions
By using servers outside of our country, VPNs allow us to jump the geographical limits of the catalogs than the different streaming video platforms, a function that allows us to access catalogs from other countries available on the most popular streaming video platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, Hulu ...
Improve connection speed
Depending on the VPN, this can also improve the internet connection in games where latency and connection speed are paramount, especially in some countries where the servers are not exactly on the same continent.
Anonymous downloads from the internet
Some countries, such as Germany, have P2P content downloads prohibited all types. If you use a VPN, your Internet provider will not be able to store a record of all the activity of their clients while they use networks of this type, and therefore, they will not be able to inform the authorities that are in charge of sanctioning users.
Company security
If a company has workers who work remotely and do not want third parties to have access to it, the only way to do it is by using a VPN, an end-to-end encrypted connection, so that absolutely no other person will be able to access the content that is sent and received from the server and the client computer.