You disable the VPN, they show “unprotected”, come on, I’m not really unprotected, why such a dramatic word, I just disabled the thing a little, I’m “disconnected” but it doesn’t mean I’m actually unprotected, the same way it doesn’t mean I’m actually protected if I’m using a VPN.
I know almost all that is true. The ISP cannot see your traffic know where it’s coming from or it’s going to nor act as a man in the middle.
On public, unsecured networks, vpns block man in the middle attacks.
Basically vpns are not silver bullets. They cover a category of privacy and security. And one can do research to find out if they trust that VPN, while usually here in America we don’t have much choice on our isp, and Verizon is one of the worst offenders along with Cox, Comcast, Charter… Well, basically everybody.
How do you think they block bittorrent or send you copyright notices?
I personally do a whole bunch of other things on my side to deal with the problems that VPN doesn’t: ad blockers, browser obfuscaters, Leak Detectors, Etc…