Is it safe to use a personal VPN app on a work computer?
Usually not, and most company policies forbid it. A personal VPN app sends all of the laptop's traffic through a third party's servers, which can break the company VPN, bypass the company's web filtering and monitoring, and hand your company's traffic metadata to a provider nobody vetted. Free VPN apps in particular earn their money somehow, often from data. It also makes your traffic appear to come from another country, which can trigger account lockouts and risky sign-in alerts. If you need privacy on public Wi-Fi, use the company VPN or your phone's hotspot. If you are an administrator, block the installation of unapproved software and look for laptops whose traffic suddenly all goes to one outside address. On a monitored segment, the NetSenX VPN view flags addresses on lists of commercial VPN services, so a laptop tunnelling everything to one of them stands out.
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