That's not to say paid VPNs are invulnerable from that risk when they become operated by companies with a history of questionable practices. “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” is a relevant axiom here. Some might be “free” but otherwise may need to make money by recording their users' unencrypted internet activity and repackaging the data it can sell from that. There are as many VPN providers as there are stars in the sky, but not all VPNs are credible. In addition to protecting your location, a VPN can protect your online activities from being recorded by the ISP that provides the internet connection you are using or anyone sitting next to you or in a nearby boat. Rather than tweaking the settings of an infinite variety of applications and hoping to never make a mistake, using a VPN can protect your devices from revealing your IP address from the rest of the internet, which would only see a VPN’s IP address and not the one for your home, office or favorite coffee shop. There’s other examples of how your IP address can fall into the wrong hands, and perhaps others yet discovered. Additionally, loading images embedded in an email message can broadcast your IP address to wherever the images are being loaded from. Similarly, some email systems may record the origin IP address you send an email from and include it with the email’s header metadata, possibly exposing your IP address to the recipient. When you visit a website you’re investigating, that website will discover and usually record the IP address from your visit. Anyone who can see your internet IP address can use that to find out - approximately, where you are physically located, and this presents a variety of risks ranging from exposing yourself to the website you are investigating, exposing your location to people you’re sending emails to or having your ISP record and sell your internet traffic. In many cases, the mapping correspondence is accurate to a city block.
An IP address has no built-in correlation to specific geography but, over time, IP addresses have been mapped to physical locations with varying degrees of accuracy. An IP address in your home or office is likely leased by an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which bills you or your boss for internet access every month.
Much like how every phone needs to have a unique phone number for the phone system to know where to send calls to, every device that is connected to the internet has a unique Internet Protocol (IP) address. A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is no cure-all for newsroom security or personal privacy, but it offers key security benefits to your workflow as a journalist, especially if any part of your day involves using Wi-Fi, visiting websites or sending emails.