When we talk about privacy, we have to think of it in terms of privacy from whom. No, a VPN will not offer you any meaningful level of privacy from intelligence agencies, but it will keep your ISP from sending you nasty letters and cutting off your service for piracy.
Basically, your VPN just replaces your ISP. So for example, if I want an ISP that's okay with piracy a VPN can be3 a good option.
Your IP address is not how you are spied on for the most part. It's more browser fingerprinting. So a VPN can offer a false sense of security when really enhancing your privacy is a lot less passive than that. Overall it can help but it's not a magic privacy button.
Also entities like the NSA with a "god's eye view" can just track you anyways. Even if the VPN service wasn't compromised, they can just watch traffic going in and coming out and correlate it to you. It offers basically no protection from high-resource adversaries.
this is useful information, remembering this for when i'm going back.
express used to switch between acceptable and unusable (and expensive), asdrill was recommended to me by obnoxious people so i never tried it (also expensive), and nord was completely unusable
Astrill does work but has fairly frequent downtimes and is overall mid (in China at least)
Lets VPN was up until recently very reliable but there's reports of users getting banned by AI that deemed the users were committing crimes. Does have Chinese users because they're one of the few that bothered to have Chinese language support
AirVPN. You can create an account without using a real email and pay in a variety of different formats. Supports port forwarding, DNS blocking and wireguard.
They also released their own libre VPN client program but you shouldn't use that and just use their wireguard config generator.