VPN, proxy or Tor

VPNs, proxies and Tor all change what somebody sees about your traffic, but they hide different things from different people. Picking one starts with a plain question: who is it that you do not want watching, and what exactly do you not want them to see?

A VPN moves the trust, it does not remove it

A VPN wraps everything your device sends in an encrypted tunnel to a server run by the provider. Your internet provider and anyone on the local network then see only that you are connected to a VPN server, not which sites you opened; the sites, in turn, see the server's address instead of yours.

What that buys you is protection from the network you are sitting on — a hotel, an office, a mobile carrier. What it costs is that the VPN company now occupies the position your provider held and can see the same traffic. The question is no longer whether your traffic is visible to someone, but which someone you would rather it be, and what that company logs.

A proxy changes the address and little else

A proxy relays requests on your behalf, so a site sees the proxy's address. Most proxies add no encryption of their own, so anyone watching the local network still sees where the traffic is going, and usually they cover only one application rather than the whole device.

That makes a proxy a narrow tool: useful for reaching something that blocks your address, or for routing one app through another country, and not much use as privacy protection. Beyond the address, everything else about the connection stays as it was.

Tor is built for anonymity, and pays for it

Tor sends traffic through three relays run by volunteers, each wrapped in its own layer of encryption. The first relay knows your address but not the destination, the last knows the destination but not you, and no single point on the path holds both ends. That structure is what makes Tor resistant to surveillance rather than merely inconvenient for it.

The price is speed: three hops and volunteer bandwidth make it noticeably slower, and some sites block traffic from known exit relays. Tor use is also visible to a network operator unless you connect through a bridge, which matters in places where the use itself draws attention.

None of the three protects the endpoints. Malware on the device, an account you sign into, and the cookies already in the browser identify you regardless of the route the packets take.