Can the Wi-Fi owner see what sites you are doing with a VPN?

Is there a downside to using a VPN?

If you pay attention to the news, you may be familiar with VPN.

Virtual Private Network. For example, recently there were reports of two teenage hackers in California that were able to bypass the parental control filters on YouTube and Apple devices by using a VPN.

It's unclear if this was a coordinated effort among several kids or an isolated occurrence by one user. Regardless, both platforms offer a simple way for users to protect their personal information from prying eyes. The problem comes in the fact that once these hackers bypassed the parental control function they were free to go where they chose on the internet.

The moral of the story is, if you are connecting to the internet, it might be wise to use a secure connection through a Virtual Private Network that protects your personal information. VPNs exist for other reasons too. They have been used to evade government restrictions or to access restricted content such as pornography and torrents without fear of punishment by the authorities. Using a VPN will keep your personal information safe and will prevent the government from accessing your data without a warrant. If it sounds like I'm trying to spin a sales pitch for our product then that's because I am. We're trying to help keep your personal information safe.

What do you think? Is using a VPN for personal and business purposes still worth it? Is there a downside? Let us know! Reade I've used them to keep my ip address secret, but in most cases they're just that, a secret. Using a public hotspot isn't safe at all, even when the provider says "your traffic is private." Using them for personal security is a bad idea IMO. I'm not talking about the usual security risk of exposing your wifi key etc to strangers. What would happen if ie Facebook (which uses lots of data gathering cookies) had my ip and they started linking it to my facebook name/pic on their wall? What if someone else saw my name/pic, logged in as me and started adding stuff to my facebook wall or sending messages via fb messenger? These possibilities make them less than ideal for privacy/security.

But there's much more. Using vpn's is an invitation to various cybercriminals and hackers to see what others are looking for. That's a huge threat to me.

Should I leave my VPN on all the time?

If your machine uses a VPN, it can make your network connection more secure.

When you use a VPN, it changes your network location to an encrypted site. If you leave your VPN on all the time, it changes your location for every website that you visit. The problem with this is that you will be using more bandwidth.

So, if your internet connection is slow and/or expensive, leaving a VPN on all the time could slow down the speed of your network. If you're worried about this, you can turn your VPN on or off when you use it. To do this, just click the Gear icon in the top right-hand corner and go to Settings.

On this page, you'll find a switch for your VPN that you can use to control whether or not your machine uses a VPN. To turn your VPN on or off, click the switch. When you have turned your VPN off, the website you're visiting will still show your location. If you're logged into the internet, you will also be logged into your email account.

How do I switch my laptop to use a different VPN? If your computer has multiple VPNs, you can choose which one to use. This might make your computer's network connection more secure by making it look like your network is in a different country than it really is.

To switch your VPN, click the Gear icon in the top right-hand corner. Click Settings and then Network & Internet. On this page, you can choose which VPN to use.

Click on the VPN to change it to the VPN you want to use. If you're not sure which VPN to use, ask yourself which one you would use if you were travelling. If you use a VPN to make your computer seem to be in a different country, you might not want to use a VPN while you're away from home. If you're concerned about this, you can turn your VPN off or off on a specific website.

Turn off your VPN on a specific website. To stop your VPN from changing your location, you need to use the Turn on/off websites and apps option on the Settings page. This lets you choose which websites you want to use a VPN on.

When you're on a website that allows you to use a VPN, it changes your location.

Can the Wi-Fi owner see what sites you are doing with a VPN?

If it is like many VPNs and is OpenVPN or similar the only sites you see are those you use your VPN for. So unless they know what DNS server you are using and you use a subnet they can see what sites you see. That's one reason some people don't use OpenVPN because if you use a public DNS server and they get access to your internet traffic, they may not like what you are doing.

Are you just curious about the traffic being sent or are you in a legal area and trying to hide that? The real question is "do they see what sites you are accessing and/or do they know your IP? If that is all you care about then you are fine, if you are trying to hide what sites you are accessing and don't care who sees your IP address then you should use a different VPN provider. I don't care what they see, they don't know what sites I am accessing and since it's a secure site their IP doesn't change.

If there are no other servers in the country then they can see where my packet is coming from but they couldn't tell the difference between me using VPN and not. The data could be used to know what DNS I am using (that is the question). Using a public DNS server, they would not have access to that information, so this would not concern me. Of course it is possible that they are using a sniffer (but they would not have my traffic).

What is it that you cannot access with a VPN? You said you cannot listen to the streams in any way. That is not true as I can hear them.

You can hear the audio as you stated but not when you try to play that audio or record. When I turn on my computer I can usually hear the audio right away and before I connect to the LAN with my VPN, but when I first connect to my VPN, the audio sounds choppy and very hard to understand. Then after I disconnect from the LAN with the VPN and the audio sounds normal. So yes, I am able to hear the audio but I cannot record it.

This could because there are multiple people on the internet at the same time on the LAN connecting with VPN. I was getting the same thing until I started using another VPN and when I did that, my audio was clear again.