Computer Help and Support

Where the data is encrypted at both ends so nothing in the middle can interpret the data. In effect it makes your activities invisible to the internet.

Most of your average joes on the internet are using it to hide their traffic. Normally without a VPN your internet usage can be tracked to se who and what you are connecting to based on the info in the routing. What a vpn does for these people is basically directs all of their traffic to be encrypted then go through a stop before being routed to its final destination that scrubs the of any self identifying info. It can be used to make your traffic appear to be coming from someplace other than your computer. Many use VPNs to get around geoblocked content like say accessing free BBC feeds from america.

Normally the BBC would be able to see that your traffic is coming from america and the content that would be available to you at the BBC site would be filtered based on the licensing standards in place for people from outside Britain. With a vpn your trafic is routed through an exit point inside the UK so that the traffic appears to be coming from the UK, or whatever country you are trying to be seen as coming from.

It was designed originally to ensure the security of information being passed over the internet and has sort of morphed to being used as a way to hide all activity regardless of the nature of the activity.