The Problem With Using VPN
With privacy becoming more and more of a concern, many of us are worried that our online activities are being tracked, and therefore it will be easier for big techs or any intended party to exploit our personal data and information. Some of us resort to using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to shield the IP address of our computer and mobile devices, hoping that the IP address of our devices will be shielded from the prying eyes of the internet. An IP address is a unique address that our internet provider assigns to each of our computing device. It's in the form of a series of digits that look similar to this: 123.86.46.73. This unique IP address is what websites use to track our online activities. The advantage of using a VPN is to shield the IP address of the device that we use to access the internet. It's like our device goes into a tunnel and then connects to the internet using the IP address of that tunnel instead of the the real IP address of our device.
The privacy protection of the VPN sounds all good until the websites that we depend our lives on think our log-in attempts through the VPN are some sort of suspicious activities that can possibly be unauthorized access. As more and more people use the same IP address of the same VPN to access the internet, the security measures of Google and other websites that we access suddenly are receiving the log-in requests from the same IP address for lots of different accounts. This makes the security protocol of our websites think that a bot is controlling our accounts, instead of us, the humans. This then triggers the annoying CAPTCHs verification that we need to do to verify that we are indeed humans and not bots. To make things worse, our accounts can be suspended from suspicious & unusual activities due to the constant change of IP address from our VPN network. Remember an IP address is a unique address of a given computing device and it's not supposed to change everyday, and yet our VPN's IP address often changes every time when we go onto the internet on the same day. I believe we all went through the stressful experience of dealing with the situation when our accounts are locked up and suspended by Google and other social media platforms. I remember the panic and the agony when I found myself being denied the access to my email account that is linked to my bank accounts. Fortunately, I found a solution to this constant access denials of my VPN access by Google and others. I found out that I could pay a little bit more to buy a dedicated IP address from the VPN provider so that I became the only person who can use that dedicated IP address, without having to share the same IP address cover-up with thousands of others. Since getting my own dedicated IP address from the VPN, I'm no longer going through the hassle of having to constantly verify myself, call and write to Google to demand the reactivation of my account. Yes, there is no free meal in this world. If we want privacy, we have to pay. If we want better privacy protection service, we have to pay even more.
** The above article is written by the Founder of this website. She is open to new writing assignments. Please feel free to contact her to discuss your writing needs.