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What are some of the best VPN services?
I'd want plenty of speed (live in Europe if that matters), and privacy you might actually trust somewhat.
What are your goals from it, who do you want privacy from?
I'm pretty skeptical on the usefulness of VPNs. Nothing is going to be faster than your bare connection of course. If you want privacy from your parents, local ISP, employer, etc, then any of them will do. If you want privacy from your government, then use Tor from a freshly imaged disposable laptop, and then pray to God because even that probably isn't good enough.
I want to be tracked less by my ISP for torrenting purposes; tracked less by google and others in everything I do online.
I'm becoming more conscious of how thumbprinted I am everywhere by how youtube gives me video recs based on things my android phone has recorded, things said out loud by me or others. Even turning off the mic access on my phone does not stop this. It seems to record all audio at all times anyway. Not sure what to do about that.
I don't think VPNs are a great solution to any of that.
If you want less tracking from the tech majors, it's probably more effective to get adblock and/or pihole and block all traffic to them. After voluntarily switching away from their services of course. Being on a VPN while logged into their accounts and/or still allowing every website that integrates with them to send traffic to them doesn't accomplish anything. And being on a VPN while blocking all traffic to them also doesn't accomplish anything.
For torrents, I've tended to think it's better to use only private trackers locally and use remote seedboxes for any "public" torrents that might be tracked or detected. Why VPN all traffic to and from your home PC just to hide your torrents from your ISP badly (they will still know you're using a lot of upstream bandwidth in patterns typical of torrent servers, if they actually care enough to check), when for a similar price, you can set up a proper seedbox that's always online and your ISP will never know about at all?
I do stick to private trackers exclusively.
I use ublock origin, privacy badger and a couple of other Firefox privacy add-ons.
It would be difficult to fully break off from google. I use youtube every day. And discord, who send all chat data straight to google. Not to mention my expensive Android phone...
What are vpns good for?
IMO, VPNs are good for hiding your traffic and evading blocks from people or organizations that are very close to you, such as family, building, employer, ISP, etc. Still not great - it's better to avoid those types of monitored connections entirely if possible; VPN is just a workaround for when it can't be otherwise avoided. They're also good for corporate/hosting stuff - if you want to set up an intranet somewhere for a group of servers to talk to each other while blocking all outside traffic, and then access them remotely. If you don't do any of that or don't know what it is, don't worry about it.
VPNs are also very cheap to operate and very profitable to run, so lots of companies get started up to run them and spam ads and sponsorships all over the place. It's a nice feel-good talisman for people who are worried about security, but mostly doesn't help much.
Forgot to mention mobile, which is indeed a tough nut to crack to have actual privacy along with the functionality that people expect. Apple and Google both track the shit out of everything on proper devices. There are alternative de-googled Android ROMs you can load, but they're mostly not very good and painful or impossible to get most of the apps you want. Banking/finance apps, mainstream social media apps, Uber and food ordering apps, etc may refuse to run on devices that aren't fully locked down stock devices.
Ideally, we wouldn't use Youtube at all. That can be rather limiting though. Viable alternatives may include creating a new Google account just for it that you only use on devices you watch on. Not sure if you can do that on mobile though. I think there might be alternative mobile youtube apps that don't use the device's main Google account, but I haven't checked that in a while. You could also download everything you want to watch with youtube-dl and send the files around manually, but most people consider that a headache.
Similarly the best you can do with Discord is probably to limit the accounts you connect to your Discord account and the devices you use it on. I've also heard that Discord desktop and mobile apps are very spy-happy, you can limit data collection better by using the web browser version of Discord only. You might need a new account though, since they probably already know everything about your old one, and will probably remember the links even if you remove them now.
There's NewPipe for alternative Android youtubing. It works well. Can't write comments though. Not sure if there's a similar thing for PC.
I've uninstalled the discord apps on my devices.
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