VPNs don’t help with tracking much, that’s done through tracking cookies, social embeds, and browser fingerprinting. VPNs only protect from your ISP tracking you.
All of the VPN advertisements are basically bullshit, talking about protecting your privacy, etc. Wink, wink, your “privacy”, right? Every website is https these days, VPNs do F-all for your privacy.
What VPNs can do is get around regional restrictions on Netflix, let you browse freely at work, and of course the primary reason is to safely pirate media.
They could see what sites you connect to, but since everything is end-to-end encrypted with TLS these days, they couldn’t see what you’re doing there. So there’s no reason to bother.
If a nation-state has you in their sights, you’re completely screwed. Nothing will effectively protect against that sort of targeted attack. Don’t worry about North Korea, worry about criminals trying to steal your identity (or your World of Warcraft account, which can be worth more than a credit card!) and giant corporations correlating your activity to sell it to third parties.
So there’s basically no reason to use one then, other than geo-restrictions or hiding from your ISP specifically, which personally I don’t really see the point in if you’re already being tracked by Facebook, Google, etc. on any major site you go to.
Potentially they could do a man in the middle attack, which is easier on WiFi but possible even on a wired network, but to get around https you’d have to ignore the bad certificate warnings. Of course they could intercept your dns requests and send you to a fake Facebook or whatever to get your password when you put it in without checking the legitimacy of the site. A vpn would protect you from that.
Personally, I run wireguard at home and keep my mobile devices on the VPN 100% of the time. It works perfectly, no slowdown, and reconnects incredibly fast. And I have a pihole with DNS over HTTPS running at home to block ads on mobile, too.
In all reality a VPN is not worth it unless you use public/open wifi often.
If you are on a public wifi… there are a number of wifi snooping techniques that can eavesdrop on unencrypted traffic and DNS requests.
When it comes to getting around Geo-blocks… well it depends on what VPN you use. Because the biggest VPN’s advertised on youtube are mostly blocked by content sites like netflix/hulu and its a constant game of adding new IP’s and then those IP’s getting blacklisted…
I can tell you that my companies website auto blocks / flags VPN users because in general VPN users are considered to be “shady” internet traffic.
Today though it really depends where you live as governments fight for control of our information.
The problem is that they can tap VPN providers directly and then put gag orders in place (depending on where the servers are) so… it might not help in the end.
So really the answer is more complicated than the question.
I set up a VPN server on my personal network so that when I’m traveling I can more securely access my servers, have a secure browsing experience in a hotel and because some hotel wifi blocks gaming sites like STEAM from connecting, it allows me to game on the road.
Beyond that, I haven’t really had a need for VPN for the usual things I suspect most people use it for such as location obfuscation and avoidance of ISP copyright violation tracking. I’m not real keen on my ISP tracking and selling my data but with the cost and overhead of VPN services, its not worth it for me… yet.
In a corporate environment, we’ve moved on to using Citrix virtual apps and desktop for most use cases where a VPN would have been used in the past. There are a few reasons to keep it around but for most end users, we’ve been working to transition people away from it.