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I use Cloudflare for my site and it's exactly as you said. See https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/reference/cloudflare-challenges/ for details. To my knowledge, website admins can't disable these challenges if an IP has displayed suspicious behavior.

That depends who you are hiding the sensitive, private data from, and whether it was already encrypted before you sent it through AirVPN. If who you are hiding it from has no power over the jurisdiction of the AirVPN server you connected to AND no power over the jurisdiction that you are sending your data to, NOR over any intermediate points between the AirVPN server and the final destination of your data, and the data was not encrypted to begin with, then yes, your security has improved a little, because your data is now being decrypted in a jurisdiction that your adversary has no power over. In this sense, AirVPN prevents adversaries from sniffing your data. However, in today's internet, it is bad practice to rely on your adversary not being in any jurisdiction, because it is hard(but not impossible) to know the full path that your data travels over, especially once it leaves the AirVPN server. It would be better if you had encrypted the data BEFORE sending it through AirVPN. If the data was already end-to-end encrypted so that only your intended recipient can decrypt your data, then AirVPN helps only in the sense that 3rd part observers will not know that YOU are the one sending data to your intended recipient(provided that your recipient is not cooperating with your adversary and has not been compromised by your adversary). If your goal is to hide your data from everybody other than your intended recipient (this would be the norm), but you do not care that people see that you are sending something to your intended recipient (provided that they cannot understand what you are sending), then using AirVPN would not really improve your security. If your goal is to hide your data from everybody other than your intended recipient and you do not want them to know that you are even sending anything to your intended recipient (they will still see that you are sending something to AirVPN, not that they can understand what you are sending), then yes, AirVPN does improve your security. Either way, it would be best to encrypt your data end-to-end before sending it. DO NOT rely on AirVPN to keep the data encrypted end-to-end, because the only way AirVPN can send the data to your recipient is to decrypt your data and send it to the recipient.