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:
- It encrypts your internet traffic in transit
- It prevents your ISP or local network from seeing which destinations you connect to
- It makes websites see the VPN server’s IP instead of your real one
- That’s privacy at the network level, not identity hiding.
I wrote a detailed blogpost. Check it out.
The hostname will be encrypted eventually (ESNI) but you’re right that the IP address is visible.
Destination IP is starting to mean less and less these days, given there’s a large amount of sites that use shared IPs rather than dedicated ones (for example, if they use Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, AWS CloudFront, etc.)
ESNI has largely been dropped in favor of ECH
Thanks - I forgot about that.