A consumer VPN service is, fundamentally, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering. The VPN service provides a secure tunnel between your computing device (whether laptop, phone, or tablet) and the provider's data center.This is important to understand. Consumer VPN services protect your transmission from your location to their location, not from your location to the destination application you're using. If you think about it, this makes sense: A consumer VPN service is operated by a completely different company than, for example, Facebook or your bank.The VPN service gives you an app that you run on your local device, which encrypts your data, and it travels in its encrypted form through a tunnel to the VPN service provider's infrastructure. At that point, the data is decrypted and sent on its way.Two things happen here: First, if you're using an https connection, your data is encrypted by your browser and then by your VPN app. Your data is decrypted only once at the VPN data centre, leaving the original encryption provided by the browser intact. That encrypted data then goes on to the destination application, like your bank.The second thing that happens is that the web application you're talking to does not get to see your IP address. Instead, it sees an IP address owned by the VPN service. This allows you some level of anonymous networking. This IP spoofing is also used to trick applications into thinking you're located in a different region or even a different country than you are located in. There are reasons (both illegal and legal) to do this. We'll discuss that in a bit.