It’s worth also saying that “VPN” is a pretty generic term. It includes:

traditional private networks where a node network or endpoint is securely connected to a local hub network, using the Internet as a transport layer (think Cisco VPN)

Ad-hoc private bridges where two endpoints have a private connection over a public network (think Tailscale)

Residential proxy services where companies can use consumer IP addresses to exit to the Internet, looking like a consumer instead of a business (think Hola VPN / Bright Data)

Network bridges that obscure the source and destination addresses (TOR and I2P)

And THEN… the one that gets all the airtime on YouTube (and is mostly what’s discussed in this article): exit proxy services where a consumer can exit to the Internet from an address other than the one assigned by their ISP (Mullvad, Nord, WindScribe, etc.)

The annoying thing is that marketing for public VPN services often leans on features of various of these configurations where the specific implementation being sold is actually quite limited.

Good article factual and well presented. The one thing I would add is a bit about threat model. Hiding your web browsing habits from your ISP is vastly different from a political dissident or journalist who needs protection from state sponsored entities. Each group has very different requirements for a VPN.

That's just about all I need. Vpn + privacy browser is as much effort as I'm willing to put in. Beyond that it gets really frustrating.

1. It encrypts your internet traffic in transit

Note that most sites use TLS these days, so your data is already encrypted in transit.

5. 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.

I often VPN to my home network while on the go. The overall web experience is so much worse without DNS level ad blocking.

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.

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.

Ill always use a vpn as theres no other way to stop advertisers seeing your local host ip.

Its not sufficient to stop them tracking, by miles, but its necessary.

1. It encrypts your internet traffic in transit

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

2. It prevents your ISP or local network from seeing which destinations you connect to

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

Yes, security is layered. Vpn is a layer.