…and it might well be telling more about you than you realize. 

To many people, the choice of car they drive is an extension of their personality and desired lifestyle. A young woman in her 20s, perhaps a social media influencer in the world of fashion, might prefer to be seen in a trendy little electric vehicle, where color and aesthetics are more important than engineering. Conversely, a blue collar guy in his forties with an outdoor job as a forester is going to need a 300+ cubic inch pickup, with jacked-up suspension, all-terrain tires and a lockable box to keep power tools and maybe even firearms.

But whatever your job and political outlook, your choice of car nowadays involves something you might not have realized – that people’s vehicles are gathering more data about them than you might imagine. The companies that harvest and market that data (i.e. car manufacturers) may probably soon be making more money out of selling demographical information about their customers’ habits and preferences than by selling the vehicles they produce.

Think about a very modern car nowadays, everything is controlled by technology, a lot of it artificial intelligence (AI). All that information is stored, and much of it sent back via cellular data to the vehicle manufacturer for ‘research’ purposes.

Sure, you’ll be able to turn off some aspects of that data collection (you hope) – such as the playlist on the in-car entertainment system, or the places you visited on your GPS, but the way you drive, your speed, acceleration, braking and cornering is also recorded – and will soon affect any motor insurance premiums you have to pay.

In short, cars nowadays are like mobile iPads, recording everywhere we go, how we get there and what we do along the way. It’s another example of the ‘surveillance society’ so neatly predicted by celebrated British author George Orwell, in his classic dystopian novel ‘1984’ – which was in fact first published in 1949.

But apart from turning off as much surveillance as possible in our vehicles, how else can we hope to keep our privacy and stay safe online from cyber-criminals and avaricious marketers, who sell our data without cutting us in on the profit? One way is to always connect to the internet via a VPN server. A VPN (virtual private network) is a software client that ensures connection from your device to the internet via a ‘middleman’ server, which both anonymizes your identity and cloaks your location. It offers this protection because VPN servers are encrypted, so hackers, data gatherers and even your ISP (internet service provider) cannot know who or where you are.

This anonymity and location cloaking offers several advantages. Let’s take a look at a couple of the most helpful aspects of VPN technology:

Avoidance of dynamic pricing

Dynamic pricing is more common than you might imagine, and with the advent of AI its prevalence is becoming much more widespread. Effectively, algorithms in some online retailers’ websites are programmed to display a higher price for a given product or service if the AI ‘thinks’ you can afford to pay more.

For example, some online accommodation portals might scan your session on their pages and note that your IP address locates you in Beverly Hills, accessing their site from this year’s model of iMac computer. The analytics software ‘decides’ that you’re likely to be quite well-off financially, so it puts the displayed price of a hotel room higher. Conversely, if you log onto that same website for the same accommodation from a suburb of Philadelphia on an ancient Windows PC, the price you see may be lower than your California counterpart. But if you come at either scenario using a VPN, you can choose to appear to be located in a foreign country like Mexico if you wish and get the room even cheaper. Furthermore, your device and other identifiable tell-tale factors are encrypted and hidden by your chosen VPN provider.

Better connection speeds

A VPN doesn’t always increase your internet connection speed, but it certainly can prevent your ISP from slowing it down to a crawl (throttling) if you are a heavy data user. Some ISPs slow down individual customers if their data traffic transgresses their fair usage policy – they then slow the customer’s data transfer such that the connection is unusable until the next monthly billing & refresh date.

Also, certain ISPs are known to throttle entire geographical areas, if a sporting event or whatever is likely to have a lot of people from a given zip code log on to their internet routers at the same time.

But by using a VPN, even your ISP can’t identify you as a customer, nor your location, as the server is encrypted. In short, this means that your connection can’t be throttled. Hence, in some cases, a VPN can actually improve internet connection speeds.

Safer Wi-Fi

Another advantage of using a VPN server is that it protects its user from ransomware, spyware and surveillance with its state of the art security features. You might unknowingly head to a shopping mall coffee shop and use their public Wi-Fi, but actually you might have logged on to a ‘phantom’ hot spot, set up by a hacker nearby. As soon as you start to type, an email arrives purporting to send you a voucher for a donut at the coffee shop you’re in. As soon as you click the link, you start to unwittingly install spyware. However, a VPN server will detect any such malicious activity and immediately disconnect the device before any harm can be done.

Business or pleasure – a VPN keeps you safe online.

There are other advantages to VPN usage, such as avoiding geographical streaming restrictions while you’re away from home, and several other useful hacks – but all in all, it’s worth remembering that if you’re on vacation somewhere exotic like Indonesia, out in your car or at home on your laptop, using a VPN from wherever you connect to the internet is a no brainer. Stay safe out there!