VPNs are often sold as a “privacy silver bullet,” but that framing causes more confusion.

A VPN does not make you anonymous.

It does not stop cookies, logins, browser fingerprinting, or payment-based identification.

What a VPN actually does is much narrower and more technical:

1. It encrypts your internet traffic in transit
2. It prevents your ISP or local network from seeing which destinations you connect to
3. It makes websites see the VPN server’s IP instead of your real one
4. That’s privacy at the network level, not identity hiding.

I wrote a detailed blogpost. Check it out.

Passkeys are built on the FIDO2 standard (CTAP2 + WebAuthn standards). They remove the shared secret, stop phishing at the source, and make credential-stuffing useless.

But adoption is still low, and interoperability between Apple, Google, and Microsoft isn’t seamless.

I broke down how passkeys work, their strengths, and what’s still missing