Virtual Privacy Networks

[CloudWatcher]

3. pros/cons

Pros:

You can appear to most sites like you are coming from the location of the VPN server
(e.g. might be able to watch BBC because the VPN server is in the UK, though more and
more sites are keeping track of VPN servers and still block them).

Your real IP address is hidden except for the encrypted traffic to/from the VPN server.

Your ISP can't tell what sites you're using (other than traffic to/from the VPN server).

Cons:

All your traffic goes through the VPN server -- which can slow things down a lot.

All your traffic goes through the VPN server -- so *they* will know a lot about you.

The logs of the VPN server might be shared with someone/some govt you don't like
(e.g. I was researching one VPN service only to find it was hosted in Hong Kong).

Basically if you're mostly using web browsers, then your ISP can tell what sites you're visiting, but as long as the traffic is encrypted, they won't be able to tell much more than that (think addresses on envelopes vs. reading the contents of a letter).