sappy_junior728 What's the technical reason for [a] ... VPN not mitigating this?
I don't know for sure. All I know is that the government has caught skilled hackers that were using VPNs.
There's a lot of shocking stuff out there like an app using the sensors permission to recreate what you are typing based on your fingers shaking your phone on impact.
location spoofing
The VPN will make your ip address appear to be a different location; however, websites can see your timezone or that you are set to use USA_english for example. You could log into your facebook account, it saves a cookie, it follows you to several other sites.
I was trying to buy sheet music from a website that is not in my country and the music website was aware that I was on a vpn haha. There are lists of known VPN IPs.