Do you need a VPN at home?

Mostly, yes. Your router is yours, its password is shared with your household rather than a café full of strangers, and nobody at the next table is broadcasting a network with your name on it. The attacks that make public Wi-Fi risky depend on sharing a network with people you don't know, and at home you don't.

There are exceptions worth checking. In a shared flat, a building where the landlord runs the Wi-Fi, or a house where half the street has had the password at some point, your home network behaves more like a café's. If that's you, treat it as public Wi-Fi, and the rest of this question is already answered.

Let's follow one evening on the sofa. You open a recipe site on your phone. Before it loads, your phone looks up the site's address, the way you'd look up a name in a phone book, and at home that lookup is usually answered by your internet provider. Then your phone connects to the site, through your router and across your provider's network.

The recipe site uses HTTPS, like nearly every site now, so your provider can't read the page, your bank balance in the next tab or the messages you send afterwards. What it can see is the names of the sites you visit, when, and roughly how much data each one used.

It also knows exactly whose line that is, because it sends you the bill. Over months, a list of site names tied to your name says a fair amount, even without a single page's content.

With WrapVPN connected, your provider sees one encrypted stream from your home to one of our servers, and how much data it carries. The lookups and the site names travel inside it. The recipe site sees the address of our exit server, which everyone connected to that server shares, rather than your home's.

It's worth being clear about the trade. Your traffic has to come out somewhere, and the exit server now sits where your provider used to. Each hour, it sends us a usage summary that includes the amount of data and the addresses and domain names reached, and that summary can be linked to your account. We can't read HTTPS content any more than your provider can.

So at home, a VPN doesn't remove an observer. It lets you choose which one has that view: the company you pay for broadband, or us. For some people that's an easy choice, and for others it's a closer call.

Plenty of people who run a VPN at home are really after something else: fewer ads. Clean Web, WrapVPN's ad and tracker blocker, stops your device looking up known advertising and tracking domains, so those connections never start. On the recipe site, the ads from those domains never load, and your phone spends less data and battery as a result.

It works in every app that uses the device's normal lookups, not just the browser, and it works while WrapVPN is connected. It's on by default on Android and off by default on iPhone, iPad and Mac, and on Windows it's worth checking the switch.

It has limits. It blocks by domain name, so an ad served from the site's own domain still appears, and a browser using its own secure DNS goes around it. If ad blocking is all you want, a standalone DNS filter can do a similar job without a VPN, and our comparison of the two explains the difference.

If the network is shared only with your household, everything you use is HTTPS, you're comfortable with your provider seeing site names, and ads don't bother you, then leaving the VPN off at home is a perfectly sensible choice. Keep it for the café, the hotel and the train, where it does the most.

Two things are worth knowing either way. A phishing email or a dodgy download arrives the same way on any network, so a VPN at home is no defence against either. And an app covers only the device it's installed on, so the smart TV in the corner needs its own app, or a different approach, if you want it covered too.

At home, a VPN is worth it if you'd rather your internet provider didn't see which sites you visit, or if you want Clean Web working across every app, and you can comfortably skip it otherwise. The easiest way to find out is to try it: the free plan gives you three one-hour sessions a week, which is plenty to see how an evening at home feels with WrapVPN connected.