[mindslight]

No, but they're (statistically) less interested, know less about you, and furthermore you're less beholden to them. Chaining VPNs multiplies the effect, with the end result looking a lot like TOR.

Centralization is bad precisely because it concentrates the information, adds context to it (what you're doing relative to others), and amortizes the cost of building surveillance infrastructure and developing the business relationships for exploiting it.

[mirimir]

Indeed. You can pick VPN providers who aren't vulnerable to your adversaries. In China, you maybe pick US providers. In the US, maybe you pick Chinese providers. And when you're chaining VPNs, you cross jurisdictions, to reduce the risk of coerced collaboration.

VPN chaining does start to look somewhat like Tor. But the bandwidth can be a lot greater. However, it's far less anonymous, because there's just a static circuit. Tor switches circuits frequently, at ten minute intervals by default.

Also, one can combine VPN services and Tor. By hitting Tor through VPNs, you hide Tor use from your ISP and its friends. And you hide your ISP-assigned IP from potentially evil entry guards. By routing VPNs through Tor, you hide Tor use from sites that you visit, and also hide your traffic from potentially evil exit nodes. One can even run VPN servers as Tor onion services.

[dreamfactory2]

So I guess VPNs centralise the traffic of people who care about spoofing geography and/or keeping their traffic private from their ISP

[mindslight]

Yeah, VPNs are certainly not a panacea.

Although last mile wireline providers have surveillance in their genes, having descended from state surveillance organs (eg Ma Bell). They already make good money servicing warrant requests for IP address records, and preemptively keeping a record of customers' communications partners would be extremely cheap. And such "network intelligence" ties right in to fighting against the commodification otherwise driving profit margins on transporting bits to zero.

I'd bet on the infrastructure-less provider that starts off only knowing my rough geographical location and what type of gift card I paid with, and that I can drop any time.

[mirimir]

US gift cards no longer work for non-US purchases. Bitcoins are currently the best option. At least for anything past the first VPN in a chain.

[mirimir]

There are many VPN services. So it's somewhat misleading to say that they centralize traffic.