A reader tried out a VPN and noticed some unusual happenings.
“I tried using a VPN; Then I got my homepage in a foreign language I didn’t recognize; once my homepage was giving me all the Canadian news, etc.I haven’t use the VPN since.”
When you use a VPN, it routes your Internet traffic through a system of servers, sometimes overseas. The idea is to hide your actual location by showing it as someplace else. Since websites decide what news or language to show you by tracking your location, reclaiming your privacy does come at the cost of convenience.
Since you can change your homepage to whatever you like and most give you the option to set up what news, weather, or language you want to use, these issues are easily fixable.
One of the reasons many of us are wiling to sacrifice our privacy and give our locations to tech companies is for convenience. If they know where you are, they know what weather and news you’ll be interested in. If Google knows where you are, where you go, and what you’ve been searching for, it’s much easier for them to return search results that appeal to you. For example if they know you live in Boise and have been chatting with your friends about Mexican food, when you search for restaurants, they know to put Mexican eateries in Boise at the top of the list.
Each user must determine what’s most important to them.