Who and what is PIA's encryption protecting me from, exactly?

p2496908

I've read the explanations by PIA on the various encryptions used by PIA, but can anybody explain to an end-user what the encryption is doing beyond basic https?  Who is barred from seeing my data that wasn't already covered by https?

Thanks!

pyro12

My understanding is that the use of a VPN prevents your ISP from having knowledge of what you do online.  They can still make guesses by the bandwidth you use (ie video streaming or torrenting), but all they can know about what you're doing is that you're connected to a VPN.

Also, any site or person you connect to will not know your IP as they will see the IP of the VPN server you're connected to instead of yours.

I agree that the encryption does, in many ways, seem redundant.  There are, however, many non https enabled sites.  I certainly like having it!

p2496908

pyro12 said:

My understanding is that the use of a VPN prevents your ISP from having knowledge of what you do online.  They can still make guesses by the bandwidth you use (ie video streaming or torrenting), but all they can know about what you're doing is that you're connected to a VPN.

Also, any site or person you connect to will not know your IP as they will see the IP of the VPN server you're connected to instead of yours.

I agree that the encryption does, in many ways, seem redundant.  There are, however, many non https enabled sites.  I certainly like having it!

This is what PIA has to say about no encryption:  

"No Encryption. None of your data will be encrypted. Your login details will be encrypted. Your IP will still be hidden. This may be a viable option if you want the best performance possible while only hiding your IP address. This would be similar to a SOCKS proxy but with the benefit of not leaking your username and password."

What I gather from this is that my ip address (and therefore what I'm doing, exactly) is still obscured. 

p2496908

I had an opportunity to discuss this with someone smarter than myself on the topic (finding such a person wasn't difficult).  

As I now understand it, a vpn's encryption addresses two things:

1)It provides encryption to a site that is merely http.
2)It provides a consistent and definable level of encryption that may not apply to https across the board.  

bgxsec

simply and basically put;

1. The VPN is suppose to encrypt all traffic from your system to the internet and traffic from the internet back to your system as long as the tunnel is established (connected to the gateway).

2. If using encryption on VPN; no one can see what your traffic is, however, they can see that you are passing traffic e.g. traffic data flow, for example, your ISP can see that you are passing traffic but does not know what that traffic is.