Think about what you use the internet for:
If you leave your home country to live or travel abroad, will you still be able to access them? Email – yes. The others? Not so much. So what’s an internet-connected traveler to do?
Think of a VPN as your own private tunnel to the internet. It does two things for you.
Everyone should be concerned about the first. When you’re using WiFi you’re making yourself vulnerable to snoopers and hackers.
A couple years ago my daughter and I were in a train station in Philadelphia. She hauled out her laptop, looked at a couple of things and muttered “that’s interesting!” She then proceeded to listen to selections from someone else’s iTunes on their nearby computer.
Granted, my daughter’s not a hacker, that kind of snooping isn’t dangerous, and the other person had left himself open to it by making that folder publicly shareable. Still …
The second item above is the one that you need to plan for while living abroad. What happens if your home country is the US and you want to watch CNN, stream a movie from Netflix or make a purchase on Amazon? CNN will tell you they can’t show video to you in your current country. Netflix will tell you that you don’t have permission to watch from that country. Amazon will let you know they can’t accept your order.
What about your bank? Will they let you check your accounts and pay bills from abroad? Some don’t. My own lets me use a browser, but when they came out with a new smartphone app I couldn’t download it from Panama. How about your credit cards – can you check balances and make payments online from outside your home country?
Some countries like China block access to Facebook and other social media. Bang – there goes staying in touch with family and friends. Sometimes it’s just annoying, like doing a Google search and seeing results in the language of the country you’re in.
A VPN routes your browsing through its own servers. The better ones let you choose servers in a particular country. Most of the time you’ll choose a server in your home country. When you do you’ll be able to shop, pay bills, bank and use other internet services you rely on for the day-to-day business of life.
It also lets you access your home country’s entertainment media and social media. It gets around social media and other firewalls and other censorship a local government may have. We have friends here in Panama who like to access home-country news from Canada and BBC television from England. With the right VPN they can do both.
Susanna Perkins is a freelance writer and blogger. In 2012 she moved, with her husband and three small dogs, from Central Florida in the USA to a small town in Panama. You can follow her expat adventures and see more about VPNs for expats here.
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