Governments should be legislating in this area. They should be making it illegal for ISPs to inspect/store this information. Not compulsory. Preaching to the choir I guess.
> a server I set up in France
Did you look into the surveillance situation in France? I understand it's also fairly bad.
I'm not suggesting a nihilistic approach where there is no jurisdiction that's any better than any other, just wondering about the choice of France. (I also like to question people's intuitions about what makes for a good privacy-respecting jurisdiction: Switzerland because of banking secrecy of decades past but not taking account of https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/25/switzerland-vo...? Iceland because of the Althing's consideration of the IMMI law package several years ago, which has not yet passed?)
Does any part of the new U.K. law permit or require metadata monitoring that might reveal more about what people are doing with their VPNs because of the quantity or timing of their traffic?
My main goal was to get my traffic out of the country which has direct control over me. The French government has no control over me. The British government very much does.
I am reminded of a quote from the BBC Wold debate. An audience member described typical ISP security in Australia as "Two men and a dog".
Apparently this bill respects human rights, but I disagree. Slurping up all the plaintext you can is outright opportunism and sly.