Mullvad seems pretty decent IMHO https://mullvad.net/en/ , and they have several anonymous payment options

VPN is not a privacy "solution". There are multiple implementations of super cookies. Super cookies transcend your ability to clear them.

Websites used to store cookies in flash, which weren't cleared, even when you "cleared all cookies," I'm not even sure reinstalling your browser cleared them.

Then there are things like google analyitcs and tracking pixels. The google login window. Captchas can betray your identity. The "referrer" header when clicking links.

There are all manner of cookies and fingerprinting techniques.

Screen size is detectable, installed fonts, installed plugins.

This is an EFF project to show you how easily your browser is fingerprint-able: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

If privacy is deeply concerning to you then I would spend way more effort on your browser than your IP.

You also have to consider that chrome, firefox, and safari all want to sync your web history to their clouds and all manner of other stuff.

When someone shares you a link on messenger, FB will click that link and download its contents to their servers for analysis.

Your phone reports your location to your carrier that sells that information.

Bluetooth can betray your identity when walking around.

Any picture can have facial idea and OCR run against it.

The only solutions to this problem of privacy are regulations.

>This is an EFF project to show you how easily your browser is fingerprint-able: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/

I liked when they silently changed it from "panoptoclik" because they realized the BDSM overtones were getting a bit much.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/11/panopticlick-30

I feel stupid: what are the BDSM overtones in "panoptoclik"? When I google it nothing obvious comes up as an explanation.

Oh my bad, I'm realizing some folks don't have the context I do and also maybe kink is a better descriptor?

This isn't the kind of thing you can plug into a search engine, you have to actually have been on the roof during that liminal period between Cablegate and Edward Snowden dropping his dox...

Let me break it down for you:

While the "Panopticon" was originally described by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the late 1700s[0], it was later repopularized when discussed by Michel Foucault's 1975 book "Discipline and Punish"[1]:

>In the mid-1970s, the panopticon was brought to the wider attention by the French psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller and the French philosopher Michel Foucault.[30] In 1975, Foucault used the panopticon as metaphor for the modern disciplinary society in Discipline and Punish. He argued that the disciplinary society had emerged in the 18th century and that discipline are techniques for assuring the ordering of human complexities, with the ultimate aim of docility and utility in the system.[31] Foucault first came across the panopticon architecture when he studied the origins of clinical medicine and hospital architecture in the second half of the 18th century. He argued that discipline had replaced the pre-modern society of kings, and that the panopticon should not be understood as a building, but as a mechanism of power and a diagram of political technology.

Foucault would go on to die of AIDS, since when he wasn't writing philosophy he was having a whole lot of unprotected sex... apparently in addition to disliking capitalism, he also disliked condoms.

On my end, I found this all out when one of their staffers kept trying to get me drunk on the roof of their then new office at 815 Eddy. Apparently it was offensive to the guy I said that as much as I love to hang out on roofs being told I look like Abbie Hoffman, I wish just once it would be a woman doing that since I'd finished all my experiments during pride and then tried to swing the convo back to censorship circumvention, my at the time PhD thesis topic.

(I've since dropped out of my PhD, and civil society in general -- I ended up having a drink thrown in my face for the above, then spending the rest of the evening looking at the linux project one of their less shitty staffers had done, and the guy who was an asshole left the org around when the Media Lab decided to stop taking money from Jeffrey Epstein.)

Anyways, sorry for the wall of text, but hope the above helps you understand -- or at least... paints a picture.

PS: Don't please don't use Google around me :-)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#Conceptual_history

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish

In order to make an informed choice, I would recommend reading this first: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

With that said, if I were to use a VPN, I would go with Mullvad.

If you're just looking to mask your public IP address and secure your network traffic while browsing on public wifi, or a network you don't control - ProtonVPN or NordVPN are good choices. Don't make it complicated. Complicated things become unused things.

I have used several and currently use Proton. Affordable, easy to use, no-logging, and they seem to have a deep commitment to privacy.

Whats the upside of keeping your IP hidden?

Appearing as if your device is in a different country (streaming services) and potentially circumventing state level censorship (China) or some forms of throttling. Some cell carriers also do some dirty stuff that can be circumvented by VPN use.

There's not too much reason to use a VPN (for web browsing) outside of that imho. The privacy gains are at the cost of a single point of failure and its just a matter of time until EvilCo acquires your favorite VPN.

It would avoid some IP-based tracking. I assume this is why I get ads for things on my computer that I previously searched for in Firefox Focus on my phone.

I used VPN.ac because they aren’t based in 14-eyes. They have OpenVPN, Wireguard, and other protocols available.

I’ve had no trouble with stability, nor any complaints the entire time of my 2-year subscription and I was connected to it probably 90% of the time. They would be my first choice if I wanted a VPN provider.

I'd set it up in a virtual machine that you use for things like "downloading linux ISOs".

If you use things like Tor inside the VPN, you'll have all those circuits collapsed into one tunnel -- a tunnel often tied to your credit card or whatever :-)

Freedom of the Press recently published what looks like a good guide https://freedom.press/training/choosing-a-vpn/

Opera has a built-in 'VPN' option, which is actually isn't a real VPN, but merely a proxy server for web browsing.

It's easy to use and if it's just about hiding your IP address to a web host, this may be sufficient.

I like to host my own Wireguard instance to access my home network from remote locations...

Note: You can use Tor to hide your IP (some services block Tor, unfortunately)

You can run your own VPN server easily enough.

I haven't tried to in a while, but every time I've tried it's been a huge pain with crufty looking software and poorly written walkthroughs.

What do you recommend setting up?

If I were to do it myself I would have a look at Algo from Trail of Bits: https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

Yes this is a good option. What I used for years. You’ll maybe end up hosting on Vultr or DigitalOcean, so if you’re worried about privacy or identity, you’ll want to use a prepaid debit card or gift card or crypto to pay for the service. I think Vultr takes crypto. Unsure if they do any KYC these days.

I use a Unifi router which has a feature called Teleport that lets you create and connect to a Wireguard VPN with very little friction.

Is dollar vpn club still going? They're often sketchy, so focus on price IMHO :-)

If you're worried about data mining while surfing, a way to go might be a BaaS (Browser as a service.) There's a bunch of "like" services that are quite expensive but a few months ago I managed to track down a couple where were affordable for someone who was vaccination in an area with little bandwidth. I can't vouch for any so I won't post any links to them, but I've seen at least one recently as low as $5 usd a month.

I paid for a VPN a few years ago, Windscribe ... I do not recommend, no sooner had a week gone by I found it pointless at any public hot spots in my locale - no real connection - no bandwidth. I wrote a few times to support but got nothing back except shrugs, maybe reinstall etc. When I need to, I now use a ssh tunnel via a server (actually a seedbox that allowed access to cli tools) which was about $5 usd a month. Though a lot more expensive for my needs it beats a ssh server account.

Mullvad is nice.

In 2022, I would strongly recommend a solution based on WireGuard.