Embed Notice

It's time for my periodic reminder that VPNs do not magically increase security or privacy.

They take your network traffic and deliver it to someone else on your behalf, then deliver the responses back to you. That is all they do. That's what a VPN is.

The only time this helps with privacy is when you don't want your ISP to know where the traffic is going or you don't want the website to know where the traffic is coming from, *but you're okay with the VPN operator knowing*. If your use case does not fit into that very specific description, including the caveat, a VPN will not help you with privacy.

(Inspired by a friend asking me VPN questions this morning, because "everyone was talking about VPNs so I assumed that's a thing we're supposed to be doing now".)