VPNs have become far more rapidly spread as of late

Virtual Private Networks (or VPNs) are designed to provide privacy, anonymity, and security for users by making a private connection to another end point through network connections. As Jinhai Zhang (2018) explains “With the increasing demand for internal network access, virtual private network built by VPN technology between individuals and enterprises has been very large-scale due to its low deployment cost, flexible management strategy and high security characteristics.” VPN’s are used more frequently in recent years, both by businesses, and by individuals. There are even companies who provide VPN services that can be purchased online, such as NordVPN and ExpressVPN. A group of Computer Science individuals Sohely Jahan, Md. Saifur Rahman, and Sajeeb Saha (2017) explains, “VPN exploits the public network infrastructure such as the Internet to send and receive data but ensures secure communication path for reliable data transmission between the sender and receiver.” In this paper, we will further explore the concept of VPNs, the potential benefits, and any particular issues regarding security, privacy, and ethical concerns.

Current Use and Benefits

A VPN can be used for a variety of different things. It allows you to create a secure connection with another network for the internet. It can be used to access region restricted sites, protect your browsing history from ISP’s, hackers, and so on. It’s mainly used as a way to connect business networks to one another and connect workers to a business network from home, which is especially useful at the moment due to current events. In addition, it can be used to put the network used in different network locations in the world so that you would have anonymity since your true location would be hidden and encrypted. If you can’t access websites or apps online, you can use a VPN to switch your online location in order to access those points of interest. There’s also even access your own home network from other locations. Essentially, all of the network traffic is sent to the same network as the VPN, and since the computer acts as if it’s in a different network, it would enable it to access the same local resources as someone who actually lives in that area. An example of this would be if an American would want to use an Italian network and wanted to see what they could access if they were in that spot.