[zaarn]

>In most circumstances, VPNs do absolutely nothing to enhance your data security or privacy.

>Acting as they do, and promoting commercial VPN providers as a solution to potential issues does more harm than good.

I think this ignores the fact that some users have different threatmodels, sometimes the privacy threat model of a user does include their ISP for various reasons (think China).

>

Starting with the obvious, if you pay for a VPN service, they have to keep your user account and associated payment information and your payment history. So, unless you are using a fake identity and an anonymous credit card (is that even possible these days?), your VPN account will be linked to your actual identity.

Depends on the VPN, some VPN providers actually don't keep that kind of history or provide options to operate and pay an account anonymously.

[jeltz]

As far as I know you can still get anonymous credit cards, and if not most VPNs accept mailed cash. I doubt that your VPN will try to collect DNA from all mailed in cash.