The only thing putting people at risk is portraying privacy as suspicious. Everyone should use a VPN.

Yeah right, because using PIA==privacy.

How about we refer people to actual privacy tools like Tor instead?

Tor has zero to do with privacy and everything to do with anonymity.

Does anonymity not imply privacy?

No, due to browsers leaking data and state actors controlling tor end points.

They still know know someone out there is doing something, and can build ad profiles and threat profiles on them, they just can't link those profiles to you easily: that is anonymity.

Privacy would be inability to build useful profiles.

Interesting. But if someone could remain anonymous, even with a profile being created for that "anonymous entity" and there is nothing tying that anonymous profile back to a real person, that would still seem to be private to me. If the anonymous profile could be connected to a real person, that would seem to be neither anonymous, nor private.

Is that ever possible? Every interaction is going to have side channels and fingerprints.

You can't entirely defeat it, but you can eliminate, or disassociate, as many things as possible.

Nonsense. Protecting traffic from nosy ISPs and carriers is exactly privacy and it's one of Tor's stated goals.

Plaintext over Tor is still plaintext.

Of course, but your ISP is not going to read it.

More so than PIA? Also make sure to tell the Tor project that, all of their marketing material disagrees with you.

There is no single method of protecting privacy; VPNs are privacy against commercial-level actors.

Tor has its own bounds, but people should use that, too. I generally think the internet is barely usable over TOR, but I don't need state-level privacy.

My point being is that these are valid tools with valid uses, and people should understand and use them, NOT that VPNs are anything other than a way of encrypting and proxying traffic.

>I generally think the internet is barely usable over TOR //

I've only used tor browser (adding to the noise!), nothing beyond web. Could you go in to what makes the internet "barely usable" over TOR, do you mean speed or is there other things you're trying to accomplish that can't be done?

It's really just a speed thing—it's not worth the anonymity tradeoff for me.

Of course, maybe I should put my money where my mouth is and use it to improve it for people who DO find the tradeoff worth it.

A VPN like Private Internet Access is among the best things a consumer can do to protect their privacy.

PIA is $3.33/month. My internet bill is $50/month.

I like to think of it as a $3 upgrade from an open line to a secure line. It's a no-brainer for me. Really it should be a default option from your ISP, only they can make a hell of a lot more than $3.33/month from you if they can read all of your data.