First of all, you are NOT stupid. It is just an area you have had no reason to familiarize yourself with, and there are gazillions of those for all of us.
That is the really wonderful thing about this little corner of the internet, is so many people who are familiar with so many areas who don't mind sharing.
Anyway. There are really cool technogeeky whiz guys here who will know better than I and may correct me, but here is the essence of it.
Every computer on the internet has an address, much like a postal address, that allows you to be identified and (generally) located. This is called your internet protocol address, or ip address for short. You can "see" what your ip address by going to this site
www.whatismyip.com (there are other sites like this, as well).
While it is obvious that terrorists,, drug dealers and other miscreants don't want their location identified (cell phones have a different.... yet same.... tracking mode), it is also true that schmucks like me don't want every one on the web to have my location. For that, we have a "virtual private network" or an ability to hide behind a "network" that logs us on to the internet from a remote location. There are a number of these services out there (some are free, like hidemyass.com), and they have varying levels of security. Some will actually sell your data, so be careful!
After much research, I chose NORD because they are NOT based in the USA, but Panama, and thus out of the jurisdiction of the USDOJ, if they were ever do decide to do something crazy. They also support linux, which I use for my OS (operating system.... it is like windows or Mac, but better
) . They are also cheap. I got 3 years of svc for about 100 dollars. They are stupid easy to set up... even with linux, which can be difficult to work with at times.
So, the mods here, if they look to see where I log in from, are going to see me connecting from London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Oslo, NYC, Dallas, Chicago etc etc. This also means that I am harder to track for ads, marketing etc.
Now, if Homeland Security wanted me, they have the goods to go "thru" an ordinary vpn and find you (too techie to go into), but if HS wanted me, I would not be stupid enough to go thru a routine vpn. I would do like Snowden did and use what is called "TAILS" as an internet throughway, using a layered router called "onion" (TOR, called for "the onion router".....layers of skin) which, if you take enough precautions, is VERY hard to get to you.
Privacy fanatics believe that since TOR was actually developed by DARPA that the fed has a back door into it and can find you, so there are other ways to be super private, but I dont' have much of an interest in those. The biggest area I might be concerned is electronically moving money outside the USA (via cryptocurrency) if things went very bad here, but I think I will just take my chances slipping over the border with some gold coins and all..... if that ever happened.
Anyway vpn is a way to hide yourself from feds, financial wonks, google (mostly) and general snoopers. There are lots of good cheap VPN providers. Again, I recommend NORD, but ymmv.
