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 encrypts it in part of the transit, the part between the VPN server and the target is the same as it would have been without a VPN
True but now your VPN provider can see everything your ISP would have. Depending on the jurisdiction of your ISP and VPN, that could make it better or worse