- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
It does, however, make a certain level of anonymity at least possible as long as you scrub your cookies regularly, never log into the same accounts over the VPN that you were using without it, and never buy anything over the VPN.
In the end, you have to sit down and ask yourself what information you’re trying to protect from whom, and how much trouble protecting it is worth. You don’t want your nosy cousin who works at your ISP to know you look at furry porn, well, a VPN should be good enough for that (provided you don’t use the ISP’s DNS). If you’re trying to conceal your actions from a nation-state-level observer, you’ve got a lot more work to do.