People have different use cases for a VPN. I use one because I travel a lot, and spend a lot of time on dodgy public Wi-Fi. Not because I’m living some Jason Bourne fantasy.
Yeah. A commercial VPN that's demonstrated its record-keeping policy under subpoena is reasonably safe if your objective is pirating media. HN commentators act like the VPN target market is Sino-Iranian freedom fighters who split their time between rescuing Uyghurs and searching for a way to cure their magical curse that makes them dissolve into dust if Google can tell they did a search for good restaurants in the area.
Most people are just trying not to get a scary letter from HBO.
> Most people are just trying not to get a scary letter from HBO.
It's safe to assume that VPN company operating in the US is compromised but I figure that three letter agencies aren't going to spoil their honeypot over some kid downloading movies and TV episodes, which just gives you an added layer of protection against raids while also preventing your ISP from selling your browsing history and avoiding DMCA letters which unfortunately can get you perma-banned from your ISP based on nothing but unproven accusations from unreliable 3rd parties.