Posey's Tips & Tricks
Microsoft Includes a VPN with Some Microsoft 365 Subscriptions
It's hidden, but it's there.
Recently, Microsoft has added a free VPN to some of its Microsoft 365 subscriptions. This VPN has been bundled with Microsoft Defender and is only available to those who have personal or family subscriptions. The VPN service is available in the United States, Canada and Germany, and Microsoft allows up to 50 GB of data usage per month before it will begin throttling the connection speed.
For right now, the VPN is not available for business or enterprise users. While I haven't heard anything official from Microsoft, there is always a chance that it could make the VPN available to business users at some point in the future. After all, Microsoft 365 Copilot was initially only available to those who worked in large organizations, but Microsoft eventually made Copilot much more broadly available. The company could end up doing the same thing with its VPN feature. Of course the opposite could also be true. Microsoft may assume that most businesses already have VPNs, and therefore never end up making VPNs available to businesses.
The reason why Microsoft provides some of its Microsoft 365 users with a free VPN is of course that using a VPN can improve both security and privacy for end users. Even so, there are a few common misconceptions about VPNs. Perhaps the most common of these misconceptions is that VPNs make you anonymous online. In reality however, nothing could be further from the truth.
A VPN works by creating an encrypted tunnel between the user's computer and the VPN server. The VPN server acts as a proxy, forwarding the user's request to a Web server, thereby making it seem as though the request came from the VPN server, not from the end user's computer.
Because of the way that the encrypted tunnel works, VPNs do provide a measure of privacy. If for example, a VPN user is connected to a Wi-Fi network then the VPN encryption will prevent others who may be connected to that network from being able to see the user's traffic, except in its encrypted form.
VPN encryption also prevents an ISP from being able to see what its customers are doing online. However, there are some ways that an ISP may be able to track customer's online activities, even if they are using a VPN. Imagine for example, that a user hosts their email with their ISP. If the user logs into their email account, the ISP will know that the connection is theirs, in spite of the fact that a VPN is being used. Similarly, if the user's computer is configured to use the ISP's DNS server then the ISP will, at a minimum, know what Web sites the user is visiting.
Even if a user has their computer configured in a way that prevents their ISP from viewing their online activities, those activities are far from being anonymous. Remember, tracking cookies don't stop working just because a VPN is being used. Similarly, most modern browsers require (or at least give a user the option of) logging into the browser. This makes it simple for the vendor who created the browser and various online data brokers to track the user's activity in spite of a VPN being used.
One last thing to consider with regard to VPN use is that when you use a VPN, you are trusting the VPN provider, who ever that may be, to keep your data private. Remember, all of your online activities pass through the VPN server so long as you are connected to the VPN. An unscrupulous VPN provider could easily log your activity and potentially even sell that activity to data brokers, law enforcement, or anyone else who is willing to pay the provider's price.
This is not to say that a VPN provider is necessarily spying on you and selling your data. There are some VPN providers who offer very strong customer privacy statements. However, there is a strong likelihood that a free or low budget VPN provider may be selling its customer's data since the provider has to do something to pay its bills. The important lesson is that whether you are using a Microsoft VPN or a third party VPN, you should always review the provider's terms of service to make sure that the provider is keeping your data private.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.