How does a VPN actually hide your internet traffic?

[Tel86]

A VPN works by creating what is called an encrypted tunnel between your specific device and a server run by the VPN provider. All of your actual internet traffic gets routed through that tunnel first, encrypted in a way that makes it unreadable to anyone intercepting it along the way, before it ever actually reaches its final real destination out on the wider open internet.

Without a VPN active, your internet service provider can see every single website you connect to, even if the actual specific content of an encrypted site itself stays hidden through standard HTTPS. With a VPN active, your provider can only see that you are connected to the VPN server itself, not which specific sites you are actually visiting through that established tunnel.

From the perspective of any website you actually visit while connected. Your traffic appears to be coming directly from the VPN server's own IP address rather than your real one, which is exactly why a VPN can make it look like you are browsing from a genuinely different country entirely, since the site only ever sees the VPN server's specific location, not your own actual real physical location.

It is genuinely important to understand this specific tradeoff clearly though. A VPN does not make you fully anonymous online in some absolute sense, it just shifts exactly who is able to see your actual traffic, your own ISP loses visibility, but the VPN provider itself can technically see everything instead, which is precisely why actually trusting your specific chosen VPN provider matters so much in practice.

So the core actual mechanism is encryption plus rerouting. Your data gets encrypted so your own ISP cannot read it, and it gets rerouted through a different server so the sites you visit see a different IP address than your genuine real one