As technology envelopes our lives at work and at home, families are becoming ever more aware of the need to stay safe online, especially with the rapid growth of social media platforms.

Our world is shrinking. Those six degrees of separation once dismissed as a geeky urban myth are rapidly becoming true, and in fact, may shrink even further over the coming years.

Many folks over the age of 50, and almost every Boomer, could tell you a story about how they reconnected with a lost friend from school simply by finding them on social media, even though the person might now live on a different continent to their mother country, half a century after they attended school in their hometown. Algorithms do this perfectly. They’re getting more efficient every day, especially on platforms like Facebook.

That Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven Bots toil 24/7/365 like worker ants, scraping and retrieving data from the world over. When you think about it, it isn’t that difficult to attempt to match surnames, first names, maiden names, and birth dates with locations, previous schools, and current occupations to suggest friend requests to people who may have been estranged for years.

How many marriages do you suppose have been wrecked from social media meet-ups with high school crushes or online college campus reunions? And would those marriages have failed anyway? Imagine the boy you swooned over at 17 is now a silver fox; single again at 57 and ready to mingle. Turns out he lives in a neighboring state and sends you a friend request. A chat online, a hidden new phone, a discreet Zoom call or two, and the next thing you know it’s cut to a motel room off the interstate highway and a frenzied removal of clothing! Ooops…

So with all this social media reconnection, and not least international charitable activity like adopting Indian tigers from your front porch in Oklahoma via an iPad, it’s no surprise that online criminals are exploiting our hunger for philanthropy, romance, and nostalgia. Equally, kids are surrounded by a plethora of platforms intended to connect, educate and entertain. These interactions so often end up in cyberbullying situations. Worse still is the ever-present threat of online grooming by child predators. To paraphrase Cat Stevens (Google it if you’re under 40!): “Baby, it’s a wild world…”.

So how do we manage to stay safe, to cherry-pick the wholesome benefits of all this connectivity whilst steering clear of the net nasties? One extremely useful defensive weapon is the often cost-free VPN – which stands for ‘Virtual Private Network’.

A VPN is a simple concept that works very effectively. It’s nothing more than connecting to the internet not directly via your internet service provider (ISP) but by a third-party, secure, encrypted server. These servers can be located literally anywhere in the world. So not only does accessing the net via a VPN anonymize your online presence, but it also ‘scrambles’ your location, so anyone trying to find your internet protocol (IP) address is going to be surprised that you appear to be located one minute in the Yukon, yet half an hour later in the Yucatan Peninsula – when in fact, you’re sitting at home in Youngstown Ohio!

There are several practical and immediate benefits to using a VPN. The most important is probably avoidance of data throttling, protection against malware installation, and the surprising benefits of exploiting the best elements of dynamic pricing. Let’s briefly examine these one at a time:

Data throttling is the common practice carried out by ISPs of slowing down internet connection speed when certain customers use excessive quantities of data. For example, if a family of four has two college students studying from home and two parents working from home, all their activities connected with media, film, and creative aspects of work & study – they’re going to be gobbling up gigabytes every day. The family’s ISP may have a fair usage policy in the small print of their contract, and the data connection to that household is slowed down (throttled) to prevent abuse of the system. But if the family home is connected to the ISP via a VPN, the ISP doesn’t know who to throttle, nor where the data drain is coming from geographically.

In terms of malware, so many false Facebook accounts and WhatsApp chats can be a way for hackers trying to access a user’s device by screen sharing on a subsequent Zoom call or sending malware in an email attachment. But a VPN detects malware probes and instantaneously cuts the device concerned straight from the internet connection. It’s like having a cyber security guard with a big stick sitting on your front porch!

Dynamic pricing is a little-known but pernicious strategy carried out by some large online accommodation and travel retailers. They all deny it, but then again, they would, wouldn’t they? In simple terms, their websites can be trained by AI to recognize a person’s geographical location from their IP address. They can be accurate to suburb level, so the Bots know if you’re accessing their site from a trailer park in Detroit or from a beachside condo in California. Of those two visitors, guess who is going to get offered a higher price for that hotel room in New York? But using a VPN can mask your location; you could even choose to access the website from a server in a less affluent country such as Mexico. Watch those prices come on down.

All in all, simply installing a VPN onto your device of choice via a simple browser extension takes literally a couple of minutes and could save you from countless problems caused by internet baddies. Like they used to say on that great old NY cop show Hill Street Blues – stay safe out there!