Tunnelbear VPN review 2021

The need to encrypt traffic and hide the reallocation has arisen in connection with the growth of cybercrime, geo-blocking of content, and the leakage of confidential data. The most reliable way to secure and simplify your internet surfing is to use a VPN. Our review will focus on TunnelBear VPN.

Why do we use VPN?

Currently, there are many options for implementing VPN networks for different purposes, so consumers of this product are faced with the difficult question of choosing the necessary VPN architecture that will meet the requirements for information protection in these networks.

VPN is the general name for a technology that allows you to create an additional network on top of the main logical network (one or more Internet connections). It can be thought of as a kind of secure “tunnel” for information processing. All outgoing Internet requests from the user’s device are “filtered” through the VPN connection before entering the provider’s internal network and are sent to the operator’s website in encrypted form.

Regardless of the software used, all VPNs work on the following principles:

• each of the nodes identifies each other before creating a tunnel to ensure that the encrypted data will be sent to the desired node;
• both nodes require a preconfigured policy that specifies which protocols can be used to encrypt and ensure data integrity;
• nodes check policies to agree on the algorithms used;
• if this does not work, the tunnel is not installed. Once an agreement on algorithms is reached, a key is created that will be used in the asymmetric algorithm to encrypt/decrypt the data.

Tunnelbear VPN – a good solution for everyone

TunnelBear is a feature-rich technology with software that runs on all platforms and stores an extremely low and non-invasive amount of data about its users. This VPN is easy to use and great for newbies. In addition, TunnelBear has a transparent and up-to-date privacy policy, written conscientiously. The price is fabulous (especially if you buy it for a year), and the free starter version allows anyone to try out the full functionality of the service (with some limitations). One of the few disadvantages of a VPN is that it is based in Canada and does not work with American Netflix.

The principle of the service is to redirect incoming/outgoing user traffic through a secure encrypted tunnel and substitute real IP to the addresses of the company’s servers. Thus, the Internet activity of users becomes inaccessible to third parties, incl. providers.

TunnelBear VPN provides a number of benefits:

• Protecting passwords and credentials. Thanks to traffic encryption, you can safely conduct banking transactions, do online shopping, use passwords and other confidential information, even when connected to public wireless networks.
• Unlimited content access. Despite the numerous restrictions on content based on geo-ownership and other factors, TunnelBear users will be able to bypass any restrictions and gain access to the desired content and game servers.
• Complete confidentiality. When using the Internet without a VPN, all online user activity can be tracked by the provider and transmitted to interested parties, for example, government services or advertisers.

Privacy and security

TunnelBear uses different data transfer protocols: for Windows and iOS – OpenVPN or IKEv2, for macOS and Android – only OpenVPN. The default is the strongest 256-bit AES encryption.

TunnelBear has a no-log policy as the service does not record users’ activities on the Internet and their real IP addresses. At the same time, according to the privacy policy, the company can provide, at the request of government agencies, data on the user’s name, email address, payment details, as well as information for the past month about the use of the program and the volume of traffic.