Confused about VPNs? Learn how VPNs really work, different VPN Protocols, what they hide, what they don’t, and how to judge VPN providers.

VPNs are often sold as a “privacy silver bullet,” but that framing causes more confusion.

A VPN does not make you anonymous.

It does not stop cookies, logins, browser fingerprinting, or payment-based identification.

What a VPN actually does is much narrower and more technical:

  1. It encrypts your internet traffic in transit
  2. It prevents your ISP or local network from seeing which destinations you connect to
  3. It makes websites see the VPN server’s IP instead of your real one
  4. That’s privacy at the network level, not identity hiding.

I wrote a detailed blogpost. Check it out.

  • Overspark@piefed.socialEnglish
    201·
    13 hours ago
    1. It means you’re letting a different company (VPN provider instead of ISP) see everything you do. In countries with sane privacy laws (i.e. not the US) this is very often a net negative for your privacy, as your ISP will be bound by your country’s privacy laws and most VPN providers are foreign (and often based in the US).

    Good blog. You touch on this point in the blog but IMHO it should be one of your main talking points.

    • sentientRant@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      9·
      10 hours ago

      Not all VPNs are fraud. Purchasing a good VPN plan should be done after a lot of research. Because the most popular or cheaper could be the worst one.

      • Overspark@piefed.socialEnglish
        5·
        10 hours ago

        Agreed, hence the “very often” and not “always”. You are always trusting the VPN provider to not fuck you over, and there probably are a few who don’t.