⚡ The List
These 10 activities expose you to real risks without a VPN — from ISP surveillance and hacking to targeted price discrimination. Most people do at least 5 of these regularly. After reading this, number 4 and 7 will change how you think about online privacy.
- #1 — Using any public Wi-Fi network for anything sensitive. Airports, cafes, hotels, and libraries are monitored by their operators and vulnerable to evil twin attacks. ISPs track every connection. Your password manager sync, email, and banking apps use these networks regularly without you thinking about it.
- #2 — Booking flights and hotels. Airline and hotel websites dynamically price based on your location IP, browsing history, and even the operating system of your device. A 2023 study found that Mac users were shown 12-25% higher hotel prices than Windows users on the same network. Booking through a VPN using a different country IP has consistently shown 8-20% lower fares in systematic testing. Try it — connect to a server in a different country and search for the same flights.
- #3 — Researching medical conditions. Your ISP can see you researched "early HIV symptoms," "psychiatric medication side effects," or "eating disorder recovery." This data is sold to data brokers who sell it to insurance companies. In the US, health insurers use data broker information in underwriting. This is not theoretical — insurance companies have been caught using browsing data in coverage decisions.
- #4 — Playing online games against strangers. Competitive gamers who win matches are routinely targeted with DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Attackers obtain your real IP from game servers and flood your connection, knocking you offline. This happens in Call of Duty, Fortnite, FIFA, and other competitive games. A VPN hides your real IP — the attacker hits the VPN server instead of your home connection.
- #5 — Using hotel Wi-Fi for work. Hotel networks are notoriously insecure — operated by hospitality companies with minimal security expertise, used by thousands of different guests, and actively targeted by hackers who know business travelers carry valuable corporate data. A 2025 Mandiant report identified hotel Wi-Fi as the third most common initial access vector for corporate espionage operations.
- #6 — Downloading anything. Every torrent, every direct download, every P2P transfer — your IP address is logged by the source and by any monitoring services observing the network. Copyright trolls, ISPs, and law enforcement all monitor download activity. VPN hides your IP from all parties observing the download.
- #7 — Job searching on your work computer/network. Many corporate networks log all DNS queries, which reveals every website you visit — including LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and competitor company career pages. HR departments and IT staff at some companies actively monitor for employees exploring job opportunities. Use a VPN or personal device/network for job searches.
- #8 — Accessing accounts from travel destinations. Banks and services flag logins from unexpected geographic locations as suspicious. If your bank sees your login from your home city one day and a foreign country the next, it may freeze your account. A VPN set to your home country location prevents these flags — especially useful when traveling internationally.
- #9 — Research on controversial topics. In countries with surveillance infrastructure, researching certain political, religious, or social topics creates permanent records. Even in democratic countries, ISP browsing data is accessible to law enforcement without a warrant in many jurisdictions. A VPN prevents your ISP from building a browsable record of your research interests.
- #10 — Using ISP-provided DNS. Even with a VPN, if you use your ISP's DNS servers, they can see every domain you query. Enable DNS over HTTPS in your browser settings (Chrome, Firefox, Edge all support this) and configure your VPN to use encrypted DNS. NordVPN routes all DNS through their own encrypted resolvers automatically.
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VPN Uses — FAQ
Common VPN use case questions
Yes, with caveats. Airlines and hotels do use dynamic pricing based on location, device type, and browsing history — this is well-documented. Connecting via VPN to a different country often reveals different prices. Effective countries for lower flight prices: India, Mexico, Poland, and Romania often show lower fares on international routes. Always: clear cookies and use private browsing mode when price shopping, compare across multiple VPN server locations, and ensure the final booking can actually be completed from the VPN location (some sites require billing address matching). The savings vary widely — from 0% to 20%+ depending on the route and service.
Running a VPN 24/7 is safe and recommended for privacy-conscious users. Potential friction points: some banking apps flag unusual login locations (add your bank to VPN split tunneling exclusions), local network access to printers and smart home devices may require split tunneling, and some streaming services may block VPN servers occasionally requiring a server switch. Modern VPNs (NordVPN, ExpressVPN) have split tunneling features that let you specify which apps route through VPN — banking and local network apps direct, everything else through VPN. Battery and speed impacts of modern WireGuard-based VPNs are minimal on current hardware.