Hi, if I’m using a VPN on my mobile and I connect to the office’s WiFi, does it defeat the entire purpose of the VPN? Is it more advisable to stay on my own data rather than connecting to the office’s WiFi?
First, define what you mean when you say “the entire purpose of the VPN”
VPN is supposed to protect you from “hostile” environments. You should be fine as long as the VPN is secure. And, don’t install any certificates if asked by your WiFi connection.
There’s a good chance they will see your vpn connection as vpn traffic which means they don’t really know what you are doing (they can see how much data you are sending and over a period of time so they can take a guess) but they will know that you are hiding it which might get you in trouble with your employer. In some cases it might even be better to not use a vpn since it will look like just normal web traffic hidden among all the other websites that you use.
Privacy in general such as things like I.P, location, etc.
That makes sense but if there are many employees in the company, they won’t be able to identify who I am especially since I’m using a VPN right?
In general I would say don’t do anything that should be private or secure on a phone.
You can test what you asked about by checking your public ip address before and after connecting to the wifi.
They could look at your Mac address and see your device name which if it’s similar to yours might give it away. I mean if they don’t really care but I don’t think it’s a good idea to risk it with your employer since it could possibly get you in trouble if they look at the usage patterns or you login with a company ID.
Even if I’m using my own data through my ISP, I shouldn’t do anything private on a phone that is connected to VPN? Do you mean things like banking services?
I get what you mean now. Thank you for sharing!
Phones are super insecure, I definitely wouldn’t use one for banking.
gee thanks! I’ll definitely take note of this for now on.