My college encourages students to use Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect VPN using a university specific portal address.
It is pushed as providing an ‘on campus browsing experience’ even if you are off campus.
College website says: “it accomplishes this by encrypting internet traffic between a personal computer and the campus network. All traffic from the client is routed through the tunnel with a campus IP address, making the traffic appear to be originating from on-campus.”
We have to sign in with our campus login to use the vpn.
Question: does using this vpn allow the university to monitor my internet traffic? Would it be better to use a personal vpn if I am concerned about privacy?
Anything helps. Thanks!
The only way to access university resources is to either be on campus, or connect to it over the internet. The latter is done via VPN in which VPN clients can connect to the University’s VPN server. It isn’t meant for privacy but rather for access. They can still see your activities as if you were on campus.
While the VPN is on, don’t do anything you wouldn’t do while on campus. The VPN may route all your internet traffic to university servers.
If you want to do private things, then use a VPN provider. When on campus, use it to connect to the internet. When off campus, turn off the university VPN, and use the VPN provider if you want for stuff on the internet.
Yes. Colleges will take action on bad activities on the network. The point of the VPN is to route your traffic through your schools hardware to allow you connection to other hardware the school uses (for example the engineering shared server).
It’s probably encrypted to the point you don’t have to worry about them taking your data. But don’t do anything illegal on it.
does using this vpn allow the university to monitor my internet traffic?
100%, your data is flowing through THEIR network.
Would it be better to use a personal vpn if I am concerned about privacy?
100%
IT guy here, worked for a university.
Question: does using this vpn allow the university to monitor my internet traffic?
YES. When your internet-connected device is logged into the VPN, data is being routed THROUGH the university network. On top of whatever WiFi/cell network you’re using, your data makes an extra stop through the university’s network before reaching its destination, and anything you’re downloading or viewing does the same before it gets to you.
So, just like when you use on-campus Wifi, your university IT department could monitor network traffic for activity that violates their policies. They might also log the traffic. How invasive/detailed they get really depends on the university and how paranoid/strict their administration is. Some really only care if they get contacted for copyright infringement or by law enforcement for illegal activity, or if someone is obviously doing something that is causing security issues, or wrecking network performance for everyone else. Others, are way more active at logging and blocking some content pre-emptively.
Would it be better to use a personal vpn if I am concerned about privacy?
Short answer: Yes.
On top of this: From my experience, the real purpose of a university VPN is to give students/faculty/employees access to resources that are restricted, so that only those university-associated people can use them when they’re not on-campus. For students, this usually means library resources, or software/other online stuff for the courses you’re taking, that the university has to pay for. So usually, people are told to only use the university VPN when they’re off-campus, and they NEED to be on-VPN in order to access on-campus things.
University VPNs tend to have limited capacity because IT budgets are tight, so if you’re just browsing reddit or streaming Netflix, they really don’t want you doing it over their VPN.