I recently bought the Bitdefender Total Security plan and included in this plan I got the Bitdefender VPN. Should I use this VPN or should I buy a more well known VPN such as NordVPN or ExpressVPN?
What is your actual use case for the VPN? I am more and more skeptical that most people need one at all.
What’s the risk you are trying to mitigate by using a VPN?
I think people are falling for a lot of marketing BS from companies selling VPNs. Are you trying to prevent your ISP from snooping by letting Bitdefender snoop instead?
You can use any VPN at all. They all work mostly the same way. The main thing is your objective of using a VPN, most probably for anonymity and accessing region-restricted content, right?
But if you are aiming for something like privacy from your ISP or website tracking, etc., forget about it! Even if VPN makes you anonymous, your data and web surfing activity are still kept on the servers of your VPN provider
So, if you trust them fully - go ahead! But beware, there is no guarantee of complete privacy of your data or sensitive info.
I just want to browse the internet in a secure way
Yes, that’s right. Got it, thank you very much for your answer
Yeah, so for the most part all the VPN does is obfuscate where your traffic is coming from and going to. This means it gets hidden from your ISP, which might be valuable if you are seeding torrents or frequently engaging in risky online behavior.
The logic in the VPN ads is that someone could be “sitting on a router” and snooping traffic and data transfers. But this requires the data transfer to be unencrypted to be useful. Most websites encrypt their transfers (see the lock on Chrome or the shield on Firefox), so the router admin/attacker only sees the website you went to and jumbled noise.
Some VPNs might add additional encryption but there are so many that these days I have no idea.
So like the other commenter said, you are effectively only hiding from your ISP. If you don’t need to hide from your ISP, you don’t really need a vpn.
I can’t think of any security risk that a VPN mitigates.
Keep system patched, don’t do sketchy things or install software from unknown sources (torrents, warez sites) and learn to recognize scam email will do a heck of a lot more for your browsing security that a VPN.
Got it, thank you very much for your answer
So happy to finally see someone addressing the VPN debate correctly, instead of just spewing out their VPN vendor names.
As said above, unless you possibly to some shady stuff you need to hide, or need a VPN for circumventing geolocation restrictions, you don’t need a VPN.
In which the Bitdefender one you got will be good enough. Bitdefender is a respectable vendor.