What is a VPN?

[Egnever]

9. Sure

people who live in heavily monitored or filtered internet locations use it for exactly that.

And no you would not be using one without purposefully setting one up. Unless it was installed by some third party software you have on your machine that you are unaware requires a private connection that installed a VPN to use when using that software. Many high security apps require a VPN to connect to the services they use. Travel agents for example often use a VPN to connect to their booking software back ends to ensure the privacy of the info being transmitted.

As far as how it works ... Basically when used as a way to hide internet activity it adds a stop on the road your information takes to its destination that masks the incoming and outgoing traffic so that it appears to be coming from wherever that stop on the road is instead of coming from your computer. So if you were in china using a VPN to connect to america you would chose a VPN service that has a server in the US and when you connected to you tube in the US what would be happening would be you would be actually connecting to the VPN server inside the US which would then change the packets so they appear to originate from the server in the US instead of from wherever you were in China before being passed on to youtube.

It is more complicated than that but that is the basics of what is going on.