this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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Privacy
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VPNs don't prevent a device from announcing its real location. And they protect you from a MITM at the ISP but not at the VPN provider, so you just switch who you trust. VPNs also don't do anything to help with the browser fingerprinting that companies use to track you around the web. From the point of view of the services and sites you connect to, all a VPN does is change your IP address, and the IP address may not be a big part of how they track you in the first place. VPNs alone do not improve privacy much at all.
What VPNs do is shield your traffic metadata from inspection by the network hops between your client and the VPN provider (though the content is almost always enxrypted even without the VPN), and change your apparent location for any service that is exclusively using IP-based geolocation.
I know almost all that is true. The ISP cannot see your traffic know where it's coming from or it's going to nor act as a man in the middle.
On public, unsecured networks, vpns block man in the middle attacks.
Basically vpns are not silver bullets. They cover a category of privacy and security. And one can do research to find out if they trust that VPN, while usually here in America we don't have much choice on our isp, and Verizon is one of the worst offenders along with Cox, Comcast, Charter.... Well, basically everybody.
How do you think they block bittorrent or send you copyright notices?
I personally do a whole bunch of other things on my side to deal with the problems that VPN doesn't: ad blockers, browser obfuscaters, Leak Detectors, Etc..