The real #privacy protections of using a #VPN come from putting all your eggs in one basket: force all your DNS and traffic through the VPN provider. Then nobody else sees your real IP address, etc. As long as the VPN provider does everything right, doesn't get hacked, or doesn't have to comply with secret government orders, it does provide a real privacy improvement. But I have a real hard time buying into putting so much trust into one service. I wonder if it is possible to be so good
@PublicLewdness I agree, but I think it is important to highlight that VPNs are a tool that has really bad failure modes for #privacy. If the provider fails, they can leak an immense amount of personally identifiable information on their users. Good privacy tools eliminate key metadata from data flows. It is possible to have tools where the failure modes are mostly just denial of service, e.g. there is no personally identifiable information to leak.
Like many things VPN's aren't foolproof. It takes research to find a good one and even then there are risks. I look at it as it os one tool in my aresenal to improve my privacy, not a single solution to do everything.