Maybe you are using free wifi hotspots in your favorite cafe, restaurant or on airport.
Maybe your GSM Carrier is tracking your traffic in internet, of course for profiling/ad cause (I’m looking at you T-Mobile, I remember that you inject your internet plans ads in Twitter app)
Security wise there is a lot more of danger waiting at you at those ‘free’ hotspots.
So what to do?
What if I told you that you can still can use those bad but free hotspot while having somekind of protection? That you could hide some of that sweet-sweet traffic for yourself…
The solution that I want to introduce to you is a VPN
You don’t have to root your android phone to use vpn.
“OpenVPN fo Android” will work with payed service as self-hosted one (this is how you can setup one)
Advanced settings that will save your battery:
To protect your connection VPN need to be connected all the time – vpn don’t know when your application will get push notification, or when your friend will make a wificall to you. So it can drain battery a bit more than without using it. But you don’t have to sacrifice your battery life that much. We can tweak some settings to make it less battery hungry.
Edit two options in your vpn server config file /etc/openvpn/server.conf:
proto tcp keepalive 1800 3600
Allow new TCP port to accept connection:
ufw allow 1194/tcp
Now change one setting on your android openvpn client config:
proto tcp
Remember to restart/reload your openvpn server so the new config will be used.
small Warning: TCP Protocol wasn’t meant to be used with VPN connection, with unstable internet connection you can fell a bit discomfort, but still the battery drain will be significant lower than with UDP setting.