VPNs are useful for improving individual privacy, but there are also people for whom a VPN is essential for their safety. Journalists and activists often rely on VPN services to circumvent local government censorship and safely communicate with the outside world. Check the local laws before using a VPN in China, Russia, or in any country with repressive internet policies. Another place people might want to use a VPN is in a war zone such as Ukraine, where hiding locations might well be a matter of life and death. To fully and comprehensively anonymize your traffic, use the free Tor network. While a VPN tunnels your web traffic to a VPN server, Tor bounces around your traffic through several volunteer nodes, which makes it much harder to track. Using Tor also grants access to hidden dark websites, which a VPN cannot do. Some services, such as NordVPN and Proton VPN, offer Tor access on specific servers. Note that Tor slows down your connection even more than a VPN. A VPN protects you against mass data collection and casual criminals who vacuum up user data for later use, but a determined adversary will almost always find a way to breach your defenses. If this does happen to you, read our story on what to do when you've been hacked.