To hide the IPs of the servers you are visiting from your internet provider?
With a VPN, the VPN provider sees those IPs. How is that better?
And why would I care that my internet provider sees those IPs in the first place?
Because someone may trust the provider of the VPN more than they trust their ISP?
>And why would I care that my internet provider sees those IPs in the first place?
You might not. Other people do. It's not your place to decide what other people care about.
My VPN provider has a vested interest in not sharing or re-selling my data, if caught doing so it would cause a major loss of business for them and potentially permanently tarnish their reputation. Additionally they provide a stable IPv4 shared with many other users. Tracking is still possible, but is far less trivial and not so easily correlated with a county/state.
So I use a VPN. It keeps me safe from script-kiddies who might discover my IP when I visit their website. I provide free help for people having trouble with HTML/CSS, so I visit a lot of strange places.
The use cases for VPNs include hiding piracy from your ISP, evading IP bans, accessing geoblocked content.
You're right that at the end of the day, it's just someone else seeing where you visit. And frankly, I think VPN users would be a higher target of surveillance anyways.
And if the VPN's company is from any 5-9-13-whatever-eyes country, you can assume all that information is being collected by them anyways.
>You're right that at the end of the day, it's just someone else seeing where you visit
You write this as if it's some trivial little detail. Who that someone is that is privy to your browsing habits is a significant detail.
“… many of the ISPs in our study surveil consumers, use and disseminate consumer data, and the privacy implications of such use and dissemination. “
source: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/look-what...
Everyone with an internet connection should at least read the Key Findings, just the first few pages of that report.
I assume that regional or small ISPs have similar practices, but these big ones have been M&A’d into massive orgs having control of “a much larger and broader cache of consumer data than ever before, without having to explain fully their purposes for such collection and use, much less whether such collection and use is good for consumers.”
And I get to circumvent the prying eyes of my ISP, office's BYOD network, etc.