Today I just spent ~100€ for a 3 year VPN subscription. A lot of money but I feel like I did the right thing.

OR, you could have bought a 1-core VPS on arubacloud.com for 2,79€/mo with 2TB (yes that's tera, not giga) of monthly traffic and installed OpenVPN on it for free (and you could have used it for many other things too, since OVPN barely eats any resources). Bonus: potentially unlimited number of users you could make certs for (you can even share it with friends!).
I mean, I guess the price is the same over 3 years, but still... plus, sometimes they make special offers, so you can get the same VM for as little as 1€/mo (and the price sticks even after the promo is over)

@endor What are the log policies of the data center?

Except for that, OR, may I know which vpn you went for? There are many good ones but also many services which aren't as good as they promise.

@endor I would go for something Icelandic... You know, because... Sustainable power. Totally not because they shred warrants and don't deal with cops... I'm just a totally green, environmentally friendly hippie.

I paid ~$50 for a lifetime subscription of Windscribe

@linuxxx I don't know for sure, but they definitely keep logs of stuff (they are a mid-sized cloud service, after all).
Still, since there's no way to truly prove anyone's data policies, I might as well trust myself rather than trust someone else - plus, I got a VPS that I can use for stuff anyway, so any traffic on top of that will hardly raise any suspicion (and I don't go on shady websites anyway, I just use it for personal services and bypassing firewalled networks).

@ilPinguino hmmm, intetesting...

I don't get the whole VPN hype. As soon ans you log in somewhere the site is gonna know that it is you.

@linuxxx I went with NordVPN.

@K1ngjulien Well, yeah... you don't log into accounts that are known / linked to you. That either means fake names, prepaid phones and credit cards or anonymous accounts.

Depending on your jurisdiction, that may be anything from your constitutional right to getting yourself tortured/shot/decapitated.

@ilPinguino I know that that's how you guarantee your privacy but that is never mentioned in any of the youtube sponsorship ads.

I'm sure most people that see those ads aren't as tech savvy as the average devrant user and would think that a VPN alone stops companies from tracking them. Which is the entire selling point of those companies.

@K1ngjulien yeah, a lot of the things we consider common sense is magic for non technical people...
Though I'm always wondering if these people would also show their ID to their drug dealer...

@K1ngjulien I use VPN on untrusted networks, or to circumvent geolock or protocol ban.