I surf the internet, check my email and log on to a website or two while at my local coffee shop courtesy of their free public wi-fi.
I know its not the safest thing to do and one day I should get around to looking at a solution to do it safely but I just never got around to it.
Until now.
A recent survey showed that 79% of respondents believe that using a free Wi-Fi connection can lead to identity theft. BUT only 27% are using a virtual private network to protect themselves.[hr]
It took me a few hours to research the various methods and the pros and cons of each. I finally decided on one that looked like it would meet my needs and the cost was perfectly aligned with my budget.. of FREE.
It’s what the techies call a VPN – or Virtual Private Network. If you want to know about the technicalities of what a VPN is than google is your friend. The best analogy I can think of is this. Visualize an open parking lot with people walking in every direction. They can see you – you can see them. But what if you plopped down a tunnel right in the middle of the parking lot. Now you – and only you can walk from point A to point B and they can no longer see you. That is how I think of a VPN.
Before I tell you my solution here were my needs:
1) Casual browser
2) Do most of my internet browsing/working at my office
3) Easy to use – little to no learning curve
4) Compatible with my Iphone AND MacBook Pro (my solution is PC compatible too)
5) Low cost to No cost
My solution is TunnelBear. (P.S. I have no affiliation with TunnelBear whatsoever) I just visited www.tunnelbear.com, hit download, installed it and bam! -done. Whenever you need to use it you just turn it on (Icon in the top menu bar – looks like a pot), and when you are done at the coffee shop just turn it off. Easy peasy.
Now I only need to use it occasionally so the 500 MB of free data per month works well for me and of course they offer different payment packages if you need more data.
Now I feel much more secure when away from home and surfing the net. If you were like me and procrastinating and if you can afford about 10 minutes – go to tunnelbear now install it and get a little piece of mind BEFORE something nasty happens not After.
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Sharing is Caring…Happy ‘Safe’ Surfing.
p.s. What do you use? Please share below.
Update 2018 – I came across this review of the Top 5 Free VPN services. Worth checking out.
Thanks Silke, I think it only took me about 5 minutes to install, pretty easy. And if you give out a tweet about them they will credit your account 1GB extra data usage per month. I tried it and it worked. Im just glad I finally got around to doing it before something happened to me. 😉
Hi Eric, this is something most of us don’t even think about. Thank you for doing the research on VPN and explaining it so well. I will have to install TunnelBear on my laptop before I go to my next coffee shop outing. I sounds easy enough. 🙂