As someone who works in tech, I feel like the sales pitch for VPNs is snakeoil for the average person. All you’re doing is trading out your own ISP spying on you for another ISP who can spy on you. I know I have rights if my ISP spies on me in my own country, but if my traffic is all egressing via a foreign country, I may have zero privacy rights in that country.

If you need to hide your torrenting activity, just use a seedbox. If you need to hide from the NSA, none of this is going to help you. And TLS basically does the rest.

Same with DNS-over-HTTPS - the DNS server is where they’re going to be spying on you!

Half the US doesn’t even use the internet outside of Facebook, which is run by one of these assholes. You absolutely do not have excellent communication technologies. The tools you have extremely vulnerable to manipulation. We’ve only seen a taste of the horrific possibilities with Facebook controlling communication and the entire information space.