It’s that time of year. The nights are longer, the thermometer rarely ventures above single digits, and the imminent visit of a certain jolly plump man in a red outfit encourages children around the world to actually listen to their parents for once. As 2024 draws to a close, it’s time to take a look back over what this year brought us – specifically at the new things we’ve learned in the world of VPNs.
VPNs are constantly evolving as technology advances. Not only is it a competitive market with providers always looking for an edge, but new threats keep popping up, making innovation and evolution a necessity if VPN providers want to keep pace with the many different groups looking to undermine them.
So, let's get nostalgic, and review the biggest and best lessons that today's best VPNs taught us in 2024.
Bundles are in
There’s no magic bullet in the world of cybersecurity. It’s an ever-evolving cat-and-mouse game between companies trying to keep us safe, and those who are trying to find new ways to defeat and breach that security.
Using a VPN goes a long way to shoring up your online security, but there are things a VPN just can’t do, and things they aren’t suited for.
The good news is that a lot of today's top services are more than just VPNs. They offer a useful suite of extra security and privacy tools if you’re willing to sign up for a higher-tier subscription.
It’s more expensive to invest in a plan that includes these extra tools, sure, but the comprehensive protection you get in return is well worth the investment. These extra features include things like:
- Password managers
- Many VPN providers offer password managers that generate super-secure passwords and save them in an encrypted vault – so you don’t need to write them down! Two examples of this are NordVPN’s NordPass and ExpressVPN’s Keys.
- Antivirus
- While there are plenty of stand-alone antivirus products on the market, an increasing number of VPN providers also bundle an antivirus solution with your subscription to help protect you from viruses and trojans. Examples of this would be Surfshark One and CyberGhost’s Security Suite.
- Ad/tracker blockers
- Online advertising is a fact of the internet today, as is the fact that companies of all sorts will try and track your every (digital) move. Advert and malware blockers help streamline your experience and protect your privacy. Most VPNs offer this as standard, these days. Windscribe calls it R.O.B.E.R.T while PrivadoVPN's version is called Control Tower.
- Cloud storage
- Some VPN providers offer cloud storage plans as part of their offerings, allowing you to store your photos, videos, and files online rather than cluttering up your mobile device’s limited storage. You can find cloud storage options with providers such as IPVanish and NordVPN’s NordLocker.
- Data removal services
- These services reach out to data brokers and request that your data be deleted, stopping brokers from selling it to marketing and advertising companies. Surfshark VPN is one of the few to offer this as a bundled service, with the Surfshark One plan including a subscription to Incogni.
- Alternative ID
- Another way to defeat data brokers and spammers is to supply fake details whenever you sign up for anything online. You can do this by using an alternative ID. This is a service that generates a fake name, email, and even phone number you can then use to sign up for websites. Surfshark and ProtonVPN are examples of companies that offer this functionality.
Innovations keep coming
As well as bundling in all these additional features, VPN providers frequently develop new privacy-boosting tools to add to their offerings.
The cybersecurity landscape is always shifting, after all, with bad actors cooking up new threats, and more countries resorting to internet blackouts and censorship to protect their regimes.
VPN providers have to work hard to keep pace. Here are some examples of the new tools we've seen this year:
- ExpressVPN’s new dedicated IPs
- Many providers offer a dedicated or static IP option, but none are quite like ExpressVPN’s offering, which claims to be able to allocate IP addresses completely anonymously, so even the provider doesn’t know who has which address.
- NordVPN identity theft protection
- NordProtect is a new identity theft protection service from NordVPN that includes credit and dark web monitoring, protection against cyber extortion, and cover against theft of your identity. No other provider on the market offers anything quite like it.
- Surfshark bypasser and data leak checker
- Most VPN providers are unable to offer split tunneling functionality on iOS devices due to limitations put in place by Apple, but Surfshark now offers Bypasser, which allows you to specify sites that don’t need to use the VPN connection, such as banking apps.
Independent audits still matter
There’s no escaping the fact that, for many of us, 2024 has seen our paychecks having to stretch further and further. When money is tight, it’s tempting to think that a VPN subscription isn’t really worth it, and that perhaps it could be a good idea to swap to one of the smaller free VPNs that have popped up this year.
Free is always going to be a tempting prospect, but swapping to one of these smaller free VPNs could cost you in the long run for a number of reasons. One of the biggest being that they tend to lack solid privacy policies – so there’s no way to know what they’re doing with your data/privacy, or if they care about it at all.
This is why independent audits are so important. These third parties take a magnifying glass to the policy/infrastructure/apps/servers of a VPN to ensure that they’re abiding by their promises. But commissioning these audits takes money that free services often don’t have. Nobody is paying them a subscription, after all.
Companies like ExpressVPN, for example, have gone through over a dozen audits. So, while it’s a little on the pricey side, there’s no doubting its commitment to security, and we’d always recommend providers like it over any VPN, free or otherwise, that hasn't had its privacy claims properly tested.
Stealth tools are going to get more and more important
2024 continued the trend of internet blackouts, government censorship, and government shutdowns.
Just this year there have been partial and complete bans in multiple countries including Pakistan, Russia, Mozambique, and Mauritius, to name but a handful.
VPNs are always going to be targeted by repressive regimes as they help citizens access banned/blocked materials like news outlets and allow them to communicate and mobilize through social media and messaging apps.
Some governments try to block VPNs entirely, but stealth tools can disguise VPN traffic as regular traffic, allowing folks to continue using them. VPNs that offer these tools include Surfshark, ExpressVPN, NordVPN, and Proton VPN.
Apps, sites, and services are still gobbling up our data
A lot of the apps and sites we use every day are hungry for as much information as they can gather about us. It's not just social media sites, either, but food delivery, maps/navigation, and more.
Most of us have gotten used to the idea that we need to trade our privacy for convenience and, for the younger generations, “privacy apathy” is an increasing problem thanks to the number of data breaches happening on an almost daily basis
A VPN can’t stop data collection entirely, but connecting through a VPN adds another layer of protection by encrypting your internet connection, which keeps your ISP from snooping on it, making it harder for bad actors to intercept and helping to reduce the number of targeted ads you see.
Certain VPN tools can give users the power to protect their data on a smaller scale, too, like a kill switch to stop you from accidentally leaking real-world information, and split tunneling to choose which apps use the VPN.
Disclaimer
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
