Steps For Setting Up VPN On An iPhone

Modern-day smartphones come with a lot of built-in protection measures for user privacy and data security—we’ve written about many of them on Lifehacker—but if you want to take the next step up in terms of keeping your information safe and private, then a VPN (or Virtual Private Network) is the best way to go about it.

VPNs act as a sort of digital cloak that goes over your devices, making it harder for other people to see what you’re doing—though it doesn’t make you completely anonymous online, as we’ll explain below.

How a VPN works

Once you’ve picked a VPN service (see below for more on this), you’ll get access to all of its servers on the web, usually located at different points across the globe. Instead of directly connecting to websites, you connect to your VPN’s servers first, and then to the pages on the web that you want to visit.

This makes browsing the web a little slower, but it also means that your internet provider—and by extension, law enforcement agencies—can’t see what you’re looking at. Data is encrypted at the same time, making it much harder to intercept, which is why VPNs are highly recommended whenever you connect to public wifi. It also lets you spoof your location, which can be useful when accessing apps and services from abroad.

Using a VPN won’t stop your browsing history from being saved on your own computer (you need incognito mode for that), and obviously if you log into your Google, Amazon or Facebook accounts then those companies will see you and your online activity—but a VPN does offer some useful protections. There’s more in our beginner’s guide to VPNs.

While VPNs were once only used by security experts and IT professionals, nowadays they’re much more mainstream, and Android and iOS have been updated to reflect that. As a result, setting up a VPN on your iPhone isn’t a difficult process, and choosing a VPN will probably take you longer than actually getting it up and running on iOS.