If you trust your home network / ISP / Government more than you trust the Starbucks (or any public) network, you get to at least transfer your risk.
But you also don't get much more than that for using a paid-VPN, you just transfer the risk of being snooped on to their network/ISP as opposed to your own. Same with running a node on AWS/Digital Ocean.
VPNs do not make you anonymous. A shared VPN might give you some plausible deniability but it's hard to trust that your specific traffic isn't being logged.
> VPNs do not make you anonymous. A shared VPN might give you some plausible deniability but it's hard to trust that your specific traffic isn't being logged.
That's true. But unfortunately, a lot of product placements on YouTube suggest exactly that. The claims of companies like NordVPN are highly misleading if not simply wrong. But especially on non-tech related channels, the audience is unlikely to know how VPNs work and what they do.
> A shared VPN might give you some plausible deniability
It might, but it's very feasible to correlate encrypted VPN traffic to outgoing traffic with netflow logs, which the underlying network operator is almost certainly storing.
But you also don't get much more than that for using a paid-VPN, you just transfer the risk of being snooped on to their network/ISP as opposed to your own. Same with running a node on AWS/Digital Ocean.
VPNs do not make you anonymous. A shared VPN might give you some plausible deniability but it's hard to trust that your specific traffic isn't being logged.