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Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

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Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

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Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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What is a VPN and do you need one?

A VPN creates a private, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet

Published June 2, 2026 11:00AM (EDT)

Salon has affiliate partnerships, which means we may get a share of the revenue from purchases made through links on this article.

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network: it creates a secure private tunnel over public networks, such as the internet, to shield your online activity from prying eyes. Millions of people worldwide use VPNs to enhance their digital privacy, bypass geo-restrictions, and secure public WiFi, among other things.

In this article, we’ll look at what VPNs are, how they work and how to decide whether or not you should be using one.

As mentioned above, a VPN creates a private, encrypted tunnel between your device and the internet. You do that by connecting your device to a VPN server. Once you’re connected, it’s the VPN server that forwards your traffic to its ultimate destination, making you much harder to uniquely identify.

Here’s a simple example:

When connecting to a site like Salon without a VPN, the traffic flows from your device to your ISP, and then to Salon’s site.

When accessing a site like Salon over a VPN connection, the traffic flows from your device to your Internet Service Provider (ISP), then to the VPN server, which forwards your request to Salon. Because your connection to the VPN server is encrypted, your ISP cannot see which sites you’re accessing (it can only see that you’re connected to a VPN server). As for the website you accessed, it can only see the VPN server’s IP address, so it cannot uniquely identify you.

The above is a high-level view of how VPNs work. Now let’s unpack that a little.

So, a VPN encrypts your connection. What does that mean exactly? It means an encrypted tunnel is created between your device and the VPN server. Encryption only occurs in that tunnel.

As your requests travel over the internet to the VPN server, they’re encapsulated in the encrypted tunnel. Once your traffic reaches the VPN server, it has reached the end of the tunnel and needs to be decrypted before your requests can be forwarded to the site or service you’re attempting to access. The website gets the request from the VPN server and can only see that server’s IP address and location—not your original IP address and location. It then sends the response back to the VPN server, which encrypts it and sends it back to your device for you to decrypt. Rinse and repeat until you disconnect from the VPN.

There are two common kinds of VPNs, each serving its own purpose:

Commercial VPNs: Commercial VPNs are designed to provide users with enhanced online privacy and security by encrypting the traffic to and from the VPN server and replacing the user’s ISP-provided IP address with the VPN server’s IP address, effectively spoofing........

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