Did you know VPN downloads increased all over the world in 2020
2020 for sure had a lot going on. There hasn’t been any one field in which anyone didn’t hear any sort of news. With everything aside, VPN downloads also increased last year. Especially in the Middle East countries such as, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar, the VPN downloads rose up to 44.75% of the market. VPN is a virtual private network that forms a secure tunnel between two or more than two devices. They protect your data, your privacy and also protect you from being tracked. Globally, these virtual private network downloads were up to about 277 million in 2020.
According to the reports of Atlas VPN, the reason why so many downloads were found to be from the Middle Eastern countries was because of the increased censorship by the government on anything in the media that was found to interfere with local laws and regional values. Out of the four countries of the Middle East the country with the highest rates of VPN downloads was found to be Unites Arab Emirates (UAE) with about 61.6% with more than 9.89 million VPN downloads in 2020.
Atlas VPN says that the reason why this rose particularly more from UAE was because of the governments strict restrictions over web surfing and the certain elements of the media which they did not think appropriate for their people. Even though internet service providers (ISPs) censor topics that may criticize the government, UAE also had imposed bans on two of the most leading internet service providers that it felt went against their values. Along with this, voice over internet protocols were also banned by the government of UAE hence giving more reasons as to why UAE was found to have the most number of VPN downloads out of the other three Arab countries.
Following UAE is Qatar in the second place with 2.88 million downloads over the past 12 months. The reasons for this are the same, with the government imposing strict restrictions on the internet. On the third place is Oman whose government is known to have strictly monitored their people’s conversations on their mobile phones or anything on their desktop. Even the country’s internet cafes fall on the same norm.
Other than these four countries on the top 10 VPN downloads list, UK falls on number 9 followed by the Unites States at number 10 with having 8.19 million downloads and 38.12 million respectively. Atlas VPN says that government restrictions weren’t the only reasons as to why so many VPN downloads penetrated last year. It is also due to the fact that from February of 2020 strict lockdowns were being imposed by every country of the world due to the corona virus and people were forced to stay at home. Most of the people started watching movies and TV shows on platforms like Amazon Prime, Netflix etc. which increased VPN downloads due to the restrictions on these platforms at some areas of the world.
The year 2020 will be remembered for a lot of things but also as the year having the most number of VPN downloads ever.
