So we have been considering using a VPN.

Not because we are doing shady things but simply as another layer for protection from cyber criminals.

I know very little about this and am curious if anyone in the hive has beneficial input.

Is it worth the cost, hassle and potential slower connections? We are still old school and use two desktop computers as well as the two cell phones that we have.

Is my paranoia taking over common sense? Am I throwing away money for no chance of loss? Is the potential for me to get hacked so low that this is not worth it?

I just recently started using a VPN provided by my anti-malware software. It IS slower but not horrible. Craiglist doesn't like it: won't let me post an ad while using it. Well it let me post but immediately takes it down. Took me a while to figure that out, I thought someone was reporting me. Nope, it was the VPN.

Just my opinion, where we are at with AI today, you probably will be alright. However within a couple of years, a cyber criminal will be able to break throw an unprotected patch in minutes.

I use UltraVPN. I really don't need anyone tracing what keystrokes I am using in a specific order - I do online banking.

Yeah, I'm not sure why I'm using it. If the FBI raided us, they are not going to find weird stuff on our computers. They might find I visit political websites on both sides and be confused though.

"A little knowledge is dangerous", funny true story, I recently was playing around with my antivirus provider and was reading different options, and I read the VPN info, & thought it sounded good, like something I should have, so I clicked turn it on.

Fast forward to a couple days later when I tried to go to my online banking on 2 different banks of mine! I couldn't access EITHER bank or accounts. I went into full blown panic mode. I just knew we'd been hacked and all our money was gone.

After calling my husband when he was on the road, and getting him to go by bank, and they changed my password, and assured him that the money was still there, it hit me what I had done. Oh my goodness......

I find VPNs unnecessary. All I hear are parroted lines from people selling those services.... privacy, browser security, being able to stream videos that are blocked in certain countries.

None of those things apply to me and/or only apply so vaguely that I can't know if a VPN would actually help me or not. How do you measure the effect of something that might never have happened anyway whether you got a VPN or not?

Stick with measurable measures.

First you need to understand what a VPN does to see if you need it. In essence, and in the context of you connecting to the internet, it makes your location appear in a different city than where you are physically at. In doing so, it also masks your IP address since many location services use the IP address to try and figure out where you are located.

Is knowing where you are physically located useful to thieves? In rare instances it can give them a starting point but as others have said, having good virus protection and extensions that keep malware from downloading if you click on the wrong site is much more important. Also, most web sites like banks use a similar but different technique which encrypts the traffic between your browser and the bank so no one can see it. Just look to the left of your web address in most browsers and you will see something that looks like a lock (or you may have to click an icon in that spot to get the details) so you know that your data is encrypted end to end.

The only thing I've really seen a need for a VPN to connect to the internet is to defeat the MLB app so you can watch your favorite teams where it's blacked out locally. It might also be useful when traveling abroad to make it look like you are in the US but many countries like China block VPN traffic since they can't see what's being sent.

I only use VPN when traveling and using public wifi on my laptop. And yes it does slow you down b/c you are "tunneling."

Sounds as if my paranoia was getting the best of me.

I do have AV software and I do not connect to corporate sites since I am no longer at the W2.

I don't do on-line banking. I don't think anyone is interested in hacking my on-line newspaper account, my Amazon account or my other web-access accounts, so I use weak passwords for them. Like, what can anyone do with my Office Depot account, order a bunch of file folders? But Amazon does not have my credit card info, so the hacker can't charge my credit card!

I didn't trust/do online banking for a long time, but when I did, I felt like the same about central A/C. Why did I wait so long?

Does going “incognito” online offer any protection?

zero,

Unless you work part time at Best Buy's Geek Squad and are globe hopping I recommend K.I.S.S.

PS

I miss paper.

My life was simpler.

Paper never crashed or got a virus.

Paper never needed to pay for an update.

If my pen ran dry I had plenty more.

We spend an average of 30 minutes a day fixing either computer or printer issues, or fixing software issues.

Oreo, I believe that incognito just keeps the cookies from happening as well as not leaving a trail on your system.

You still have your IP and all of that showing up.

I just checked online and saw that the deed for the new house has been sent to the seller.

Online stuff like that I can check as much as I like. Calling and asking where are we on this purchase five times a day would get old.