[staticsafe]

At the risk of sounding increasingly naive:

I believe policy is important as a part of the solution because it is a matter of protecting the general public not just a select technically capable.

Yes, policy is hard and can be useless but I still believe it is an important goal to fight towards.

You can care about your privacy, use a VPN and use the democratic process to enact policy change. Those things need not be mutually exclusive. VPNs are only a part of the solution and incomplete, not the solution.