If you want to increase your online privacy and surf the internet more securely and anonymously, VPN is what you must look for. A VPN is one of the best tools you can choose to help you explore the internet more openly and securely while maintaining your privacy and anonymity on the web. You might want to use a VPN to give yourself more security and privacy online or you might want to use it to bypass geo-censorship and content blocking. Therefore, comprehensive knowledge of what VPN is and how it works is important to help you understand why you need one and what better suits your needs.

In this article, we will elaborate on the full definition of VPN, how VPN works and why you need one. You can use the table of contents below to navigate through the article more easily.

VPN stands for "Virtual Private Network". It is a privacy and security focused service that creates an encrypted connection to the internet over your public network, through your device. This means that whenever you want to connect to the internet via VPN, it will create a private path for you to securely communicate and transfer data within the internet while using public networks. This essentially means that using a VPN will hide your IP address from your ISP (Internet Service Provider) and third-party data collectors. This makes you anonymous on the internet; helps protect you from security threats; eliminates web activity tracking and data manipulation; and allows you to access geo-restricted content and bypass censorship.

The foundation of VPN technology can be traced back to 1996 when it was founded by a Microsoft employee Gurdeep Singh Pal, as a peer-to-peer tunneling protocol or PPTP.