this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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166
How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant (sentientrant.com)
submitted 1 day ago by sentientRant@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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:

  1. It encrypts your internet traffic in transit
  2. It prevents your ISP or local network from seeing which destinations you connect to
  3. It makes websites see the VPN server’s IP instead of your real one
  4. That’s privacy at the network level, not identity hiding.

I wrote a detailed blogpost. Check it out.

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[–] Overspark@piefed.social 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)
  1. It means you're letting a different company (VPN provider instead of ISP) see everything you do. In countries with sane privacy laws (i.e. not the US) this is very often a net negative for your privacy, as your ISP will be bound by your country's privacy laws and most VPN providers are foreign (and often based in the US).

Good blog. You touch on this point in the blog but IMHO it should be one of your main talking points.

[–] sentientRant@lemmy.world 11 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Overspark@piefed.social 8 points 23 hours ago

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.