UK Home Secretary Theresa May summarized new laws that would give government and law enforcement intelligence agencies the power to snoop on anyone’s private data in the United Kingdom, but astonishingly, nowhere in the proposition does it mention using Virtual Private Networks (VPN).

But, an intriguing purpose was found by The Stack – nowhere in the draft legislation are VPNs. VPNs are subscription services which operate by fielding users’ internet traffic through a protective communication protocol on the other side of the net, which means you can’t tell where it originated from

This is useful not simply for protecting a user’s actions online but also to assist trick geographically limited video content services including Netflix, BBC iPlayer as well as the NBC TV program service, or empowering citizens to obtain services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter in states where the net is censored, for example Turkey or China.

Most VPNs have to paid for because the user is basically paying to their web traffic through a private server to be able to connect to sites such as Netflix or Facebook (there are ones that are free, but a few of them aren’t excellent).

This also means if the user does anything prohibited, law enforcement will go after the VPN supplier and either ask it to freeze the user’s account or to divulge IP address and the user’s account details.

Tor (from The Onion Router endeavor) is the name for software that redirects and anonymises web traffic through a global network of relays included of volunteers who set their computers up as Tor nodes.

The source and final destination are efficiently anonymised and shielded from interception since the data travelling between any two nodes on the network simply includes the details of these nodes, and every Tor course is shielded by at least three layers of encryption