VPN

A VPN or Proxy can hide your real IP to the website that you are visiting but does not guarantee anonymity!

Use cases for a correctly configured VPN/Proxy/Tor (check for DNS leaks):

Access resources remotely from a private network e.g. Enterprise network or for example access to a NAS (VPN only)
Hide your real IP address from a website you are visiting. (Limits some tracking where websites log the IP of who created the account or the last logged in IP)
Get around geo-blocking / or rate-limiting
Bypass some censorship, network filters or Website blocks
Hide some of the traffic that your computer sends from your local Network i.e. your local Coffee shop free Wifi, Enterprise Network or ISP. But give the proxy or VPN the technical opportunity to log that traffic instead. (Tor is the exception here due to union routing, but is still theoretically possible to deanonymize traffic by using time correlation and monitoring the entry and exit node traffic)
How is Tor different from other proxies?
- Benefits of HTTPS and Tor visualised
- Which Tor node knows what?