TechRadar’s experts regularly spend hours trying and testing all the most popular VPN services on the market. Our reporters closely follow the industry for the latest news, too, mapping how new online threats are shaping VPN usage.
This work is pivotal in ensuring that we recommend only the best VPN apps available and keep you up to date with new trends across the industry. However, it still doesn’t provide the full picture of what our readers actually need from our VPN content.
This is why TechRadar needs you! We’re interested to hear from you regardless of what you think about VPNs – even if you don’t know what a VPN is or you aren’t a fan of the technology. We then invite you to take our quick VPN survey and help us inform the content we create. Don’t worry, though – it’ll take less than five minutes to complete, and your answers are completely anonymous!
Why more people just want a VPN
A VPN, short for virtual private network (VPN), emerged as a security tool to boost users’ online privacy and security.
It does so by both encrypting all internet connections to prevent third-party snooping, then rerouting these via its VPN servers dotted across the world to spoof users’ real IP addresses for extra privacy.
Around since the 1990s, VPNs were initially a technology reserved for businesses and IT nerds. As life increasingly moved online, however, the need for everyone to secure their online privacy became more relevant.
Recent statistics show, in fact, that an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide used VPNs in 2024, with the global VPN market projected to reach $76 billion by 2027.
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Besides being more private online, VPNs also turned out to be a great tool to bypass geo-restrictions you may find on the internet. That’s because VPNs’ IP-spoofing capabilities make you look as if you’re browsing from a completely different country within a couple of clicks.
More and more people have started using a streaming VPN to unlock foreign libraries enforced on Netflix catalogs and similar platforms.
Likewise, VPNs also enable millions of people worldwide to access a free and uncensored web. As per Proton VPN data, 119 countries saw VPN usage soar in 2024 during times of political crisis, as citizens needed a way to evade government-imposed internet censorship.
As new policies are stifling internet control everywhere across the world, and new tech like AI and quantum computing expose all of us to new threats, we expect to keep seeing the world of VPNs evolving and becoming increasingly relevant.
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