This article is intended to explain in a simple and clear way what are the VPNs, the proxy and Tor, and the differences that exist between them. The article is designed to be understandable by anyone so it may contain oversimplifications and impressions.
Currently these three systems have mainly three uses:
Avoid censorship on the Internet: As you should know there are several countries with restrictions on Internet use. For example, YouTube is blocked in at least 10 countries. Although potentially all three systems avoid the blocking of certain websites (such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), in practice, VPNs are the safest system to avoid blocking.
These systems are designed for unblock websites with geographic restrictions: Please note that some countries do not allow certain sites and if you are in one of these countries you can use these systems. For example to watch series and movies on Netflix when you are in a country that does not exist or you prefer to use that of another country. Although you can use a VPN, a proxy or Tor to unlock this content, currently only good VPN providers and some proxy are able to offer speeds compatible with streaming.
Improve Internet security: Many people use these systems to prevent bank or personal data from being stolen by third parties, especially when they connect to public networks (a risk that is increasing exponentially). However, contrary to what is thought, the proxy and Tor do not help in anything to improve Internet security (sometimes even the opposite); only VPNs with good encryption protocols improve the security of your connection.
What is a VPN?
The VPN or Virtual Private Network in a summarized way is to connect to a public network as if you were connected to a private network. In other words, it is a system that allows you to connect to a public network (for example, a free Wi-Fi network of an airport) as if you were connected to your company’s computer.
What is a proxy?
In general, a proxy is a something channeling all your connection through it in a way. The proxy server acts as an intermediary between the Internet and your computer (or smartphone); the result is that for practical purposes it will seem that you are connecting to the Internet from the proxy (the computer that channels your connection) and not from your computer.
What is Tor?
Tor was created as a non-profit organization to help Internet users to preserve their anonymity. Although the system is a little complex to explain, we would say that the operation is similar to the proxy but with a differential characteristic, instead of channeling traffic through a single server (or computer), it uses a network of volunteers channeling the traffic for multiple servers that change constantly, making it difficult to determine the origin of the connection.
Comparison between VPN, Tor and proxy
In this section I will compare the three services:
Proxies are undoubtedly the least robust system and are usually not able to overcome these internet restrictions and if they do, the benefits are very poor and soon they are identified by the government and blocked. Although Tor is much more robust than the proxy, its operation is slow and many governments are trying to put an end to it, so in addition to not ensuring you can overcome censorship, it is very possible that you put yourself in the crosshairs of the government to which you are trying to get around their censorship. In this sense, quality VPNs usually offer the best performance between reliability and connection speed, although they are not infallible.
Image source – VPNDen
