What does VPN use tell us a about a country and its freedoms?
Whether it’s for work or leisure, virtual private networks, or VPNs, are an essential tool for accessing the internet. Which is why I’m still surprised when I tell my students about them at the start of my innovation course, warning against free services and recommending an article on how to choose one that keeps no records, how so few of them are aware of their benefits.
It’s VPNs very usefulness that makes them a social and political weather vane. Take China, a country where VPNs are not against the law per se, but where, in 2017, the government expressly instructed telecom operators to block people from using them by February 2018. The move appears to have relatively little follow-up: use of VPNs is widespread, especially by companies that maintain business activities with foreign countries and cannot risk having their communications disrupted.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the government’s recent attempts to prevent the use of VPNs have had the opposite effect: millions of Russians use VPNs on a daily basis to access uncensored information from abroad; the government’s response is to put their IP addresses on an ever-longer blacklist and a scare campaign. One free service, Amnezia, which users can run on their own server, has become a particular headache for the Kremlin.
