Originally Posted by eljefino
No. HTTPS keeps you protected in banking and shopping.
A VPN lets you disguise your geographical area so you can do stuff like watch region-limited videos out of that region. It disguises your IP address which can be useful if you want to read news bypassing a pay wall, or order airline tickets without appearing desperate to buy space on that flight. If you're into file sharing "they" can't find you as easily.
Persons living in "oppresive countries" can use VPNs to get "the real google" and not their country's limited version. Americans paranoid about such topics can VPN tunnel to a place of their choosing as well.
I get annoyed when I'll look at something on ebay/ amazon on my work computer and somehow my home computer later has an ad for said item. I would need to do some cookie destroying and ad blocking but a VPN may be a good tool in addition, especially if it's reputable and has a software suite tailored for privacy.
This is only partially correct, and I applaud your simplification, but let me clarify. HTTPS is doing encryption of that protocol, generally from your web browser to the remote side which is generally some secure web presence like a bank or online retailer. There is also a verification process where the remote side SSL certificate is validated. Lets take Amazon.com as an example- any traffic between your device (your browser, be it on PC, iPhone or tablet) and Amazon.com is encrypted , and the certificate validates they are really who they claim to be. All good so far. But lets say you open up a new window or browser tab and go to another website- this now has nothing to do with Amazon.com, so you are now relying on this other website to support any security and encryption.
The VPN however is encrypting data from your computer to the remote side VPN device, so ANY data going down that path is being encrypted, not just https / ssl. In practice it may or may not make much difference, but if your in IT and using something that does not use HTTPS then you might be exposed if your data is intercepted. In either case the data is encrypted fairly well, but a VPN is popularly considered to have stronger encryption. There are a couple of gotchas though: Https has the option of supporting no encryption , but any organization dealing with https should not be choosing this option. And vpns generally used specialized hardware at the remote end point because the encrypt-decrypt process was very compute intensive , while https / SSL accelerators are a more recent innovation compared to VPN hardware.
I am sure there are many more tidbits and omissions I made, as this is getting really into detail, but now you have a bit more insight.