BuzzFeed Interviews Francis about Cyber Security

Last week, the House repealed internet privacy rules requiring broadband companies to ask for your consent before sharing or selling your information, like browsing history, location data, app usage data, and content communications. If Donald Trump signs the legislation into law, all of your unencrypted online activity – essentially everything you do on websites without a padlock in the URL bar – is up for grabs by advertisers.

Without these privacy protections, your porn viewing, shopping, and search habits could be made public. There is, however, one very easy way to maintain your privacy: using a virtual private network, or a VPN, which is like an invisibility cloak for your browsing history.

How do I choose what VPN service to use?

Picking the right VPN is actually a little complicated, but hopefully this guide will make it less so.

Security expert Francis Dinha, CEO of Private Tunnel, offered a few of his best tips:

– “Stay away from free services, because you’ll go back to the same problem. Some VPNs are going to collect your information to push advertisements to monetize,” said Dinha. Hola VPN was caught violating user privacy in 2015. Just remember: There’s no such thing as a free lunch!

– Dinha also advised staying away from providers that use weak protocols. If you’re not sure what makes a protocol strong, VPN University has a great chart comparing different methods. It shows that OpenVPN is the strongest protocol, followed by L2TP (Layer 2 Tunnel Protocol) and the Windows PC-only SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol), which all use 256-bit level encryption. On the product site you’re looking at, look for those bolded words and you should be safe.

Read more from Francis in this BuzzFeed article