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.
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.
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.