A wide variety of (typically commercial) entities provide "VPNs" for all kinds of purposes, but depending on the provider and the application, they often do not create a true "private network" with anything meaningful on the local network. Nonetheless the term is increasingly prevalent. The general public has come to mainly use the term VPN service or just VPN specifically for a commercially marketed product or service that uses a VPN protocol to tunnel the user's internet traffic so an IP address of the service provider's server appears to the public to be the IP address of the user. Depending on the features properly implemented, the user's traffic, location and/or real IP may be hidden from the public, thereby providing the desired internet access features offered, such as Internet censorship circumvention, IP-address masking (not to be confused with anonymity), and geo-unblocking. They tunnel the user's internet traffic securely only between the public internet and the user's device and there is typically no way for a user's devices connected to the same "VPN" to see each other. These VPNs can be based on typical VPN protocols or more camouflaged VPN implementations like SoftEther VPN, but proxy protocols like Shadowsocks are used as well. These VPNs are usually marketed as privacy protection services.