How to Setup a VPN on Android Phones

In this day and age, no one should need convincing that security, privacy, and anonymity online are virtues.  Between data breaches, hackers, malicious state actors, companies dropping the ball on protecting your information – there’s no shortage of reasons to protect yourself.

Many of us take measures to protect our home networks, our laptop or desktop computers, and so forth.  But few of us extend any kind of protection to our smartphones.  What do you need to protect against on a smartphone?  And how do you go about protecting a smartphone?  A VPN might be the perfect option.

What are VPNs?

VPNs, or Virtual Private Networks, are services (usually paid subscription services) that offer clients and apps to users.  With these clients or apps running, a user’s internet traffic routes through a “tunnel” to the VPN server.

The traffic is encrypted during this trip, and it bypasses any kind of government or ISP monitoring – they can’t decipher the traffic, and only see it going to the VPN server.

From there, the VPN decodes the traffic, assigns an outbound IP address from its pool, and passes the traffic on to the final destination server.  The process runs in reverse for the response from the destination server, and gets it back to your system.

This mechanism offers several advantages over a regular internet connection without a VPN.  For one thing, the encrypted traffic between yourself and the VPN server greatly decreases the ability of anyone to read or monitor your data.

At the same time, the anonymity of your IP address being obscured means destination server activities and traffic cannot be ostensibly linked to “you” by way of your real IP address.  And, what’s more, VPN services have servers in a number of different countries, which allow you to spoof your location as being in one of those countries, thereby accessing geo-restricted content, or bypassing restrictions on content, that are based on country or region.

Why You Should Use a VPN on Your Phone

Of course, the reasons to use a VPN on a computer and your phone may be somewhat different, though the principles are the same.  First, you gain security through the encrypted data tunnel.  You gain anonymity through the IP address-obscuring function of the VPN server as an intermediary.

Any, you can gain access to geo-restricted content, like unblocking a different country’s version of Netflix, or bypassing censorship blacklists on certain sites and content.

For smartphones, one of the most important elements of using a VPN is the advantages you gain in protecting your connection and files from local threats, such as when on public or unsecured Wi-Fi networks.  Because your traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel to the VPN server, you’re effectively shielded from local attacks on the same network or access point.

At the same time, many VPN service providers include robust security measures in their VPN apps for smartphones.  These augment the native benefits of a VPN, by providing additional functions such as proactive Wi-Fi security, software firewalls, kill switches to keep