Does a VPN make me anonymous?
No. A VPN hides your traffic from the network you're on, like café Wi-Fi or your mobile carrier, and hides your IP address from websites. But the VPN provider can now see where you connect, and signing in, cookies and in-app trackers still identify you.
With a VPN, your phone sends everything through an encrypted tunnel to the provider's server. The local network sees only that tunnel. Websites see the VPN server's address instead of yours.
So choosing a VPN is a decision about trust: you're betting the provider is more trustworthy than the network you're on. Some no-logs promises have been checked by independent audits, others turned out to be false, and some free VPN apps have been found collecting and sharing user data.
- Use a VPN on untrusted Wi-Fi or to hide your IP address from sites
- Pick a provider with an independently audited no-logs policy
- Don't expect it to stop tracking: logins, cookies and advertising IDs keep working
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VPNs: What They Hide
From the Network Privacy course. See what a VPN hides from the local network and who can see your traffic instead.