[jscd]

This is not providing the same functionality as a "traditional VPN," in the sense that it does not do anything to your traffic going to the wider internet. With popular VPN services, they are an encrypted tunnel for all your internet traffic (some use the same protocol, WireGuard), but at the end of the tunnel they decrypt the message and send it to whatever website you requested, which is exactly what can cause those privacy issues you describe.

In this case, though, it creates an encrypted tunnel _only between your own devices_. This allows you to connect to all your devices, home desktop, phone, laptop, as if they were on the same network, allowing you to do fairly sensitive things like remote desktop without having to expose your machine to the public internet or deal with firewall rules in the same way.

Assuming this project is legitimate, then the only traffic this service would even touch would be those between your own devices, nothing related to public internet requests. And, on top of that, the requests should be encrypted the entire way, inaccessible to any devices other than the ones sending and receiving the requests.

There are many caveats and asterisks I could add, but I think that's a fairly straightforward summary.