My wife and I will visit five countries in Europe next month: Italy for five days, then on a Viking cruise ship with stops in Slovenia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Greece, where we’ll stay for an additional five days.
I’ve heard some experts recommending a signing up for a VPN when traveling, both for security and to ensure you’re able to get to sites that might block traffic from outside the US. (I’m not sure I visit many such sites.)
My wife and I will each have one phone and one tablet. (We have a mixed marriage: she’s IOS and I’m Android.) We’ll want to text, e-mail, and phone, use Google, Google Lens, Google Maps, and Facebook, and I’ll need to get to SDMB, of course.
I’ve already arranged with my carrier, T-Mobile, to have a European phone, text, and data plan for the month of our trip.
Do I need a VPN, and if so, what do you recommend?
Any other suggestions for the digital aspect of our trip?
If those apps are all you are going to use, I don’t see how a VPN will do much for you.
BUT if you might do anything to do with your banking or finances - even checking your balances, but certainly anything to do with payments - as a minimum make sure you have installed and used your bank’s app before you go, as the most secure way of protecting yourself against dodgy wifi for instance.
Never use text or email to discuss or do anything of that nature.
I’m not sure what you’re thinking here about “such sites,” but … the blocking is about GDPR compliance. Many American web operators, given the choice between satisfying the high bar of personal-data security including granular cookie refusal versus simply refusing European visitors, choose the latter. It’s better now than it was, but I still regularly click on US-based sites and get a message along the lines of “our European visitors are important to us, but we’re still working on our compliance mechanisms” or some such.
The other thing that happens with European web traffic is geo-blocking on streaming services. If you plan on using your tablet to keep up with a new Amazon Prime show in your hotel room in the evenings, there’s a nonzero chance you’ll find it unavailable via local connection. A fair number of expats here use VPN to pretend they’re still in the US so their entertainment patterns aren’t interrupted.
It depends on which websites are important to you, what you can’t live without for three weeks. The things you’ve listed all seem fine to me; I can confirm they’re available and unblocked. (At least for now. Facebook is, uh, in some trouble in Europe. That won’t have a meaningful impact for a while, though.)
Personally I think a VPN is overkill for a three-week visit. There are use cases where it may be warranted, but for generic internet usage, I’d say no.
There’s a very small chance we’ll cross paths. If you see someone waving, that’ll be me.
I think if you stick with using the phone’s mobile data, you’ll be fine. You are probably at a slightly higher risk of problems using WiFi, but I would use it for browsing the web and streaming music or movies. For email or accessing cloud storage like Dropbox, I would revert to mobile data. I don’t know how generous T-Mobile is with overseas data plans. I have Verizon, and my “unlimited” data follows me overseas, so I just keep WiFi off, but if I had limited data I wouldn’t hesitate to use hotel WiFi, except for banking, etc.
Have you considered disconnecting for three weeks? Assuming you’re able to make sure all your obligations in the US will be covered while you’re away, it seems to me that you’re facing a unique opportunity to get away from your routines while immersing yourselves in other cultures. That’s my recommendation, because most people could never do that at home.
Although probably not relevant for your travels, I have found many websites geo-blocked not because of GDPR, but for fear of being hacked. For example, large portions of the utah.gov website are inaccessible, meaning I have to use a VPN to get my corporate tax forms every year. My old credit union was also paranoia-blocked, though when I asked them about this they had their IT people open access for my IP address. (It lasted for a while and then stopped working again.)
Regardless, symptoms are the progress bar freezing at a point around 20% of the page loaded, followed by some kind of server error after a couple of minutes. I turn on my VPN and reload and all is fine. I don’t know which idiot thinks their geo-block is good policy, especially given hackers all know how to use a VPN, but such is the world in which we live.
I think this will probably keep you covered on your trip. If your accomodations provide wifi, you wont need to even use data much, as long as you do all your web surfing at your hotel.
One caution on this, unrelated to the original question about VPN: modern smartphone apps love quietly calling back to the cloud in the background. Even if you’re not actively using an app, it may have some kind of heartbeat or synchronization process or something. If data usage is a concern, then maybe do a deep dive on the device’s processes and stop everything that doesn’t have a good reason to be contacting its mothership.
Data Saver - prevent all apps from using mobile data in background
Allowed networks for apps - specify mobile data use by app
Mobile data - turn off completely
I know iPhone has similar settings
I assume that you already have instructions from your provider to turn on roaming data in the first place to use your plan.
I got a subscription to one of the more common VPNs for my trip to Germany and the UK last year. I found it interfered badly with basic apps like Google so I kept having to turn it off and on. And I didn’t notice any improvement in service otherwise. Most of what I wanted to watch on Nteflix on my iPad was still available without, so it wasn’t the end of the world.
I was only alluding to the fact that, being in the US, I don’t know if there are sites I routinely visit that would be blocked if I were outside the States.
You can’t miss me: I’ll be the pudgy, middle-aged white guy in the tour group.
I’m not exactly a digital addict. I won’t be constantly checking my e-mail or social media, etc. Probably just Googling to see what that cathedral over there is, or using Google Lens to translate a sign, or maps to guide us somewhere, or texting or phoning home. My wife will probably be posting our ongoing travelogue on FB in the evenings. But I expect after day after day of organized touring, I’ll probably be too tired to check out SDMB, which is my main online addiction.
I’ll probably do this. Thanks for all the other advice and suggestions.
For iOS, to limit apps using cellular connectivity in the background go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. From there, you can turn off background refresh completely off, or you can choose which apps you want to still have access.
To prevent an app from using the cellular network completely (but still have access to wifi) go to Settings > Cellular Data and turn off which apps you want.
