How to check if your vpn is leaking private data

A virtual private network is a great way to keep your Internet use safe and private whether at home or on public Wi-Fi. But how private is your activity on a VPN? How do you know if the VPN is doing its job or if it is inadvertently leaking information to those who try to intrude on your activities?

How private is your activity on a VPN?

A simple way to see if the VPN is working is to verify your IP address on the What is my IP or similar site. The service will report your current public IP address. If you are on a private network, it should show the VPN IP. If it doesn't, you're having a problem.

Your public IP address is just one way that private information can be leaked through a VPN. To see the full privacy of the VPN and other information, you can visit IPLeak.net. This website checks for a number of ways that your IP address and other information may leak, including more than WebRTC (a browser based on chat technology), DNS leaks, torrenting, and geolocation.

The geolocation test is usually useful, keeping your location safe is quite simple. Just don't allow any website to use your location while you're on a virtual private network. One way to do this is to specify a browser, Firefox for example, to browse only from a private network. It then rejects location requests in that browser. As an alternative, you can use an extension that provides a fake location to websites that request it.

We recommend you read our article on the best free VPNs of 2016

A recommended option to avoid being spied on, is to change your ISP's default DNS provider to one that is free, for example, OpenDNS (now called Cisco Umbrella), Comodo Secure DNS or Google's.