HOW GOOD DOES AVAST VPN WORK INSTALL

This is thanks to the fact that ISPs usually assign IP addresses to home users in the same geographical vicinity in blocks, and databases of where these blocks of IPs have been assigned are publicly available. It may even sometimes require legal coercion, although most ISPs are happy to voluntarily cooperate with legitimate law enforcement requests.Įven without uniquely identifying you by your IP address, however, your IP address always tells websites which country you are in, and probably even in which city. Identifying an individual in this way is, of course, quite unusual. Should the police need to identify a particular user of that website, it’s a simple matter of asking the ISP to identify the customer it has assigned that IP address to. Websites routinely log this information, together with timestamps, frequency, and duration of visits, in order to understand how the website is being used and how it is performing. Without a VPN, this is the unique IP address that your ISP has assigned to your router. Websites can see the last IP address in the chain of connections between your device and the webserver.

Even when HTTPS is used, though, your ISP can still see and log which websites you visit (just not what you do on them).Īnd what your ISP can see, so can your government. This includes the individual pages you visit, any payment details you enter, and any form data that you submit. Without HTTPS, your ISP can see everything you do on a website. Thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of the Let’s Encrypt campaign, the use of HTTPS has increasingly become the norm, rather than the exception it was just a few short years ago.Ī closed padlock in your browser’s URL bar indicates that HTTPS is being used. HTTPS is an encryption protocol that secures the connection between a website and your device. This is good, but your ISP can see which website you visit anyway, thanks to the fact that even if the DNS query is encrypted, the IP destination information required to correctly route your data isn’t. In recent years there has been a growth in third-party DNS services that do, in fact, encrypt DNS queries made to them. It also knows which websites you have visited because just about every ISP in the world logs the DNS queries they process (together with a timestamp of when you make the query).Įven if your ISP doesn’t perform the DNS lookup (for example, if you manually typed in the IP address or used a third-party DNS service), it can still see the DNS request because these usually are not encrypted. Your ISP (such as Verizon, Vodafone, or Comcast) knows the IP address of the router you are using and whose account it belongs to. Once your browser has obtained the correct IP address from your ISP, it will initiate a connection with the website (or other internet resource). When you type a website’s URL into your browser’s address bar, your browser will send a request known as a DNS query to your ISP, asking for the correct computer-friendly IP address that you wish to connect to.ĭNS is similar to a big telephone directory that maps URLs like “” to their corresponding IP addresses. Each device on the internet is assigned a unique number known as an IP address.

Your internet service provider (ISP) connects your device to the internet, so all data between your device and the servers (e.g., websites) you connect to on the internet flows through your ISP’s servers. We’ll start with some internet basics and then talk about how a VPN fits into the picture, followed by a question-and-answer section at the end. In this article, we will go deeper and explain the more technical aspects of how a VPN works in a way that’s easy for anyone to understand.

HOW GOOD DOES AVAST VPN WORK INSTALL

Our blog post What is a VPN? explains what this technology does and some reasons you might find it useful to install your own VPN on your device. A virtual private network (VPN) provides privacy and a host of other benefits when connecting to the internet.

How good does avast vpn work