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A VPN moves who sees your traffic
A cell provider or internet service provider is usually a large company with a lot of good lawyers. A VPN can be a shady overseas business, in India or Malaysia or wherever, that nobody has heard of. Reputable VPNs and disreputable ones both exist, and they change all the time, merge, and go out of business.
Used correctly in the right circumstance, a VPN can help. Some will take cash and create no link back to the user's real-world identity, which can be valuable. Even a shady VPN may beat connecting to the Chinese telecom network while traveling through China.
Set up wrong, a VPN can be a privacy disaster.
How does a VPN reroute traffic?
The VPN app builds an encrypted tunnel from the device to the VPN company's server. Websites then see the server's address rather than the phone's address, and the cell provider sees only the encrypted connection to the VPN server. The VPN company, though, can see which servers the device contacts. Most websites already encrypt page content with HTTPS, which hides the content from anyone in the middle.
Why is a no-logs promise hard to verify?
A VPN company's claim that it keeps no records rests on software only the company can see. A few services have paid independent firms to audit their systems and have published the reports. Others have been tested when courts or police demanded records and the companies had little or nothing to hand over. Auditors check a system at one point in time, and software can change afterward.
Why does China restrict VPNs?
China's Great Firewall blocks many foreign sites, including Google and Facebook, and VPNs are a way around it. In 2017 the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a notice requiring VPN providers to hold government licenses. The notice set a deadline of March 2018 for the cleanup of unlicensed services.