[kbart]

"How do you know you can trust this ISP any more than the one you're already using?"

Simple. For example, you live in a country where ISP's are allowed to do whatever they want (or forced to do what government/letter agencies wants), so if you value your privacy and data, you use VPN company that's based on a country where private data is respected and protected by law.

[tjoff]

Well, the opposite is quite common.

Your ISP has strong laws that require a court order for anyone to take a peek or identify you. Your VPN provider does not but can legally do whatever they want with your data. Mining, providing/selling personal information etc. (and they are equally forced to reveal everything asked for when faced with a court order).

The combination of using a service such as a VPN (drawing attention to your activities) with less legal protection is in my opinion the biggest arguments against using a VPN.

[kbart]

Yes, but it's much easier to choose/change VPN than ISP, because because VPN providers usually are not geographically bound as opposed to ISP where it's not uncommon to be stuck with single ISP available. Furthermore, if you have a reputable ISP and your traffic is not being filtered/snooped, there aren't many reasons to use VPN service at all.

[tjoff]

Yes, but these are points that are very seldom brought up at all in these contexts yet they are quite important.

[josteink]

And how can you know this VPN provider is not a honey-pot setup by the same forces/agencies you are trying to avoid?

[kbart]

If you are such a high-level target that these agencies went out of their way to setup honeypot for you, no VPN will save you anyway. But in realistic case, nobody is going to setup honeypots just to capture your porn search history.