What can a VPN actually hide?
Less than the advertising suggests, and more than the sceptics allow. Here is the specific list.
What it does hide
- Which sites you visit, from your internet provider. They can see you are connected to a VPN and how much data you are moving. They cannot see where it is going.
- Your traffic from others on the same network. On public Wi-Fi, the network operator and anyone else on it see encrypted traffic to one address.
- Your real IP address, from the sites you visit.They see the VPN server’s address instead.
- Your approximate location, from those sites. Coarsely, and only to the extent they rely on your IP address to work it out.
What it does not hide
- Who you are, once you sign in. Logging into an account tells that service exactly who you are, VPN or no VPN. This is the single biggest gap between what people expect and what they get.
- Your activity, from the VPN provider. You have not removed a party who can see your traffic; you have changed which party it is. That makes who you choose, and what they log, the whole question.
- Anything from browser fingerprinting and cookies. Advertising networks identify you by your browser, your logins and your behaviour. None of that is an IP address.
- Malware, phishing or a compromised site. A VPN is a tunnel, not a filter. It carries a malicious download as faithfully as a safe one.
- Anything you type into a fraudulent page. Encrypted all the way to the fraudster.
- Your identity from law enforcement, in general. Providers operate under real jurisdictions and respond to lawful requests.
The honest summary
A VPN moves the point at which your traffic becomes visible, from your internet provider and the local network to the VPN provider. That is a real and sometimes valuable change, particularly on networks you do not control. It is a change of who sees you, not a disappearance.
For what your provider can see without one, read what your internet provider can see. For the public Wi-Fi case specifically, is public Wi-Fi safe.