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submitted 1 day ago by sentientRant@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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.

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[–] sentientRant@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

VPN also hides unencrypted DNS and non-browser traffic which are sometimes not TLS.