Better title: VPN services only provide weak privacy, and can see your traffic as much as any other ISP.<p>They are good for escaping an ISP that messes with your traffic and injects things or a country with soft Internet censorship (where soft means they won&#x27;t arrest you, they just block stuff arbitrarily). They&#x27;re not anywhere near what Tor or a similar system will give you -- but that comes at a cost of speed and complexity.<p>I also agree that the best VPN is one you set up yourself on a VPS that you control. Not everyone knows how to (or wants to) do that, but if you can it&#x27;s great. One of the cheap tiny VPS offerings from Digital Ocean or Vultr.com is great as a personal VPN endpoint and can also double as a personal web server, backup repo, etc.