What VPN stands for

For a long time only the geekiest nerds knew anything about VPNs, but that's changed thanks to the popularity of services like Netflix. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network and is a very fancy way of saying that your data is kept secure by passing it through a separate connection when it travels over the public Internet.

What you might not realize is that the data you send across the Internet is not secure, even if you think it's safe because you used a password, or because you're using your browser to hide your identity. None of this is true. The only way to transfer data/use the Internet is to hide your data inside another connection, and this is exactly what a VPN does for you.

So, a Virtual Private Network (VPN) works like this -  you connect your computer, or other device, to the Internet. Once you're online you then use VPN software to create a connection to a secure server in the same country as you, or usually in another country altogether. Once your VPN connection is established whatever data you send across the Internet is then routed through this second connection, making it complete secure.

The best way to imagine a VPN is that it creates a tunnel through the public Internet, and your Internet connection is hidden inside that tunnel. That's why you'll hear some tech heads talking about things like "tunneling protocols". There's no need to get into any of that to understand what a VPN can do for you.

For years VPNs were used to help business people connect to their office servers to collect emails, or view the company's Intranet site. VPNs back then were tricky to use, with unstable software, and physical password devices required. These days VPNs are very easy to use, and give you the level of Internet privacy you've always been entitled to in the first place. They're also an ideal way to access geographically locked content. One example of this is being able to access US-only content when you're based in France. Netflix is one perfect example of why more and more people are using VPNs, even though it's ridiculous that Netflix is forcing paying customers to use a VPN to access content they're already paying for. But anyways...

So what VPN stands for is Virtual Private Network, but what it really offers you is a secure, private way to connect to the Internet without anyone being able to snoop on you.