Welcome to If Then, the show about how technology is changing our lives and our future.

I'm April Glazer.

And I'm Will Oremas.

Hey, everyone, welcome to If Then.

We're coming to you from Slate and Future Tense, a partnership between Slate, Arizona State University, and New

America. We're recording this on the afternoon of Tuesday, March 5th. On today's show, we'll

take a look at an increasingly popular online privacy tool that has some serious trust issues

of its own. I'm talking about VPNs or virtual private networks and why the average internet user might have a very hard time figuring out which one to trust.

We'll also look at Privacy Blunder No. 1 billion from our friends at Facebook.

This one involves a feature to ostensibly help keep your account safer

that turns out to be another good way for Facebook to keep track of

you wherever you go. Mark Zuckerberg once told Congress, you own your data, but it seems that once

you give Facebook your phone number, you're never getting it back. And as always, we'll end with

Don't Close My Tabs, some of the best stories we saw online this week. That's all coming up on If Then.

Some of you may have noticed that we've been experimenting with our format over the past few

episodes. We'd love to hear your feedback on how that's been going. But just to keep the

spirit of experimentation alive, we are going to be doing something a bit different this week, and I'm interviewing Will,

my co-host, about a fascinating story that he published last week. I'm interviewing him because

it was just such a good story, and I thought it was something that our listeners may want to explore more.

It is about VPN's virtual private networks, and let's just jump in if that's cool.

Will, I'm curious if you could just start by telling us what a VPN is.

Yeah, sure thing.

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