A VPN can hide where you are in the world. It can't hide who you are once you log in

Started by Debbie96, Today at 04:10 PM

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Topic: A VPN can hide where you are in the world. It can't hide who you are once you log in   Views(Read 41 times)
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Debbie96(1)

Debbie96

A VPN, or virtual private network, encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through a remote server, which means your internet provider can see that you are connected to a VPN but not what you are actually doing online, and any website you visit sees the VPN server's location rather than your real one. This genuinely protects against a real category of surveillance, an internet provider logging and potentially selling your browsing history, or someone on the same public wifi network intercepting your unencrypted traffic

What a VPN cannot do is stop the website or app you are actually using from seeing exactly what you do on their own service, since a VPN only protects the journey your data takes, not what you willingly hand over once you arrive. The moment you log into Google, Facebook, or any account tied to your real identity, that service already knows who you are and can track everything you do while logged in, completely regardless of whether a VPN is running in the background

Cookies, browser fingerprinting, and account based tracking all continue working exactly as normal through a VPN connection, since none of them depend on your IP address the way basic location tracking does. The honest, simple way to think about it is that a VPN shields your connection, not your identity, it is a genuinely useful privacy tool for hiding your location and general browsing pattern from your internet provider and public networks, but it was never designed to make you anonymous once you start authenticating into accounts that already know exactly who you are

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