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.
Great article! I’ve been trying to explain VPNs to my family members for years and it just doesn’t stick. I’ll send this their way next time.