VPNs — what they are, when you need one, when you don’t

If you have spent any time watching YouTube in the last few years, you have probably been told at least once that you absolutely need a VPN. The ads are hard to escape. Hackers on public Wi-Fi, sinister figures in hoodies, a promise that the service will keep you safe, anonymous and free to watch whatever you want from anywhere in the world. It is a great marketing pitch. The reality is a bit more boring and, honestly, a bit more useful once you cut through the noise.

A VPN, short for virtual private network, is really just a way of sending your internet traffic through somebody else’s computer before it reaches the website or app you are using. When you connect to a VPN, your phone or laptop builds an encrypted tunnel to a server run by the VPN provider. Everything you do online then flows through that tunnel. To your home broadband provider, your mobile carrier, or the coffee shop Wi-Fi, your traffic looks like a single unreadable stream going to one place. To the websites you visit, it looks as though you are coming from wherever the VPN server happens to be, not from your actual location.

That is the whole trick. Once you understand it, the usefulness of a VPN becomes much easier to judge. It changes two things about your connection. It hides your traffic from whoever runs the network you are on, and it changes the apparent location of where that traffic is coming from. Everything else the ads talk about is a knock on effect of those two things.

The original reason VPNs existed was for work. If you have ever connected to a company network from home, you have probably used one. Your laptop pretends to be sitting in the office, which lets you reach internal systems, shared drives and applications that are not exposed to the wider internet. That use case is still alive and well, and if your employer asks you to install one, that is what it is for. You do not get a choice about which provider to use and the rules are set by your IT team.

The consumer version is a different animal. Companies like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and Proton VPN all offer roughly the same thing. You pay a monthly or yearly fee, install an app, pick a country from a list and your traffic gets routed through one of their servers. The marketing focuses on three big claims. It will keep you safe on public Wi-Fi. It will stop your internet provider from tracking you. And it will let you watch things that are blocked in your country. All three are partially true and all three need some unpacking.

The public Wi-Fi argument was genuinely important about ten years ago. At the time, a lot of websites did not encrypt their traffic properly, which meant someone on the same cafe network could in theory see your passwords or read your messages. That has mostly been fixed. Almost every serious website now uses HTTPS, which encrypts your connection end to end, even without a VPN. Your banking app, your email, your social accounts, they are all already encrypted the moment you press send. A VPN on public Wi-Fi today is a belt worn alongside braces. It is not a bad idea and it does add a layer, but the idea that an unprotected user is one coffee shop visit away from a hacked bank account is a relic from an earlier internet.

The tracking claim is trickier. It is true that your broadband provider can see which websites you connect to, and a VPN hides that. What it does not do is hide you from the companies who do the actual tracking. Google, Meta, TikTok and the rest do not need your IP address to follow you around the web. They use cookies, fingerprinting, logged in accounts and the apps you have installed on your phone. A VPN does nothing about any of that. If you want to reduce tracking, a better browser with good privacy settings, a decent content blocker and being careful about what you log into will do far more than any VPN.

The streaming argument is where most ordinary people get real value, and the VPN companies know it. Sports, films and TV shows are licensed differently in different countries. A match you can watch for free in one place might cost a small fortune somewhere else, and some of the biggest streaming libraries are only available in the United States. By picking a server in another country, you can sometimes reach content that your home IP address cannot. This does work, though the streaming platforms fight back. Netflix, in particular, puts a lot of effort into detecting and blocking VPN traffic, so your server of choice might work one week and stop working the next. It is also worth pointing out that getting around regional licences is often against the terms of service, even if it is not a criminal matter in the UK.

There are a few cases where a VPN really does earn its place. If you travel abroad and want to keep using UK services like BBC iPlayer or your online banking without being flagged as suspicious, a VPN makes that easy. If you live somewhere with heavy government filtering, a VPN is one of the few practical tools for reaching the open web. If you are a journalist, activist or researcher who handles sensitive material, the extra layer of separation between your traffic and your identity is worth having. And if you just prefer not to have your broadband provider building a profile of every site you visit, there is a reasonable privacy argument even without any specific threat model.

What a VPN does not do is make you anonymous. Your provider still sees everything that passes through their servers, which is why the trustworthiness of the company matters more than the marketing copy. If they keep logs, or if they are based somewhere with aggressive data sharing laws, you have simply moved the problem rather than solved it. Paid services with a clear no logs policy and independent audits are the bare minimum if privacy is the point. Free VPNs are almost always a bad deal, because running servers costs real money and the business has to come from somewhere, usually your data.

The honest summary for most people is this. A VPN is a useful tool for a small number of specific jobs. It will help you watch things while travelling, it will add a reasonable layer of privacy on networks you do not trust, and it is essential in certain working and political contexts. It will not make you invisible, it will not stop the companies who already track you, and it is not the last line of defence between you and a stranger in a hoodie. Pay for a reputable one if the jobs it actually does are jobs you need doing. Skip it, without guilt, if they are not.