Depends on what you want it for. To pretend you are in the US for netflix or to evade the fbi. The ones that advertise are good for the first.
Rolling your own fixes one issue and raises another.
I think you can't really prove an entity to be trustworthy; you can only really prove that an entity is not. I trust Mullvad about as much as it's possible to trust a VPN company... but, that's probably as good of a recommendation as you can really get.
Your own, purchased using untraceable means (fake ID is the easiest... and likely most illegal).
If you pay using the right method, Mullvad doesn't know your identity.
Came here to promote Mullvad as well. Not that they can’t point back to your up address or some such but since you can login to the VPN using a unique identifier instead of an email address and password it’s a pretty decent way to decouple it from your PII.
And you can pay with cash. I always feel a bit funny dropping $10 cash in the mail with no return address but so far it’s always made it into my account.
They have your fingerprints now (and possibly your DNA from the stamp)!
No, I use SnailOnionCoin. It sends my cash through a number of intermediaries, each just getting a .onion adress explaining where to send it next. Every hop is also switched between cash in snailmail, western union and bitcoin to make it harder to trace the links and make sure that physical traces (like fingerprints) or legal traces (like the postal system or traditional financial transfers) don't make it to the final recipient.
Is this satire or a real thing? Because nothing comes up when I google it.
Not only your fingerprints, but the fingerprints of the dozens of people who handled the envelope and cash. Who knows what they could do with so much information?
But anyway they know my home IP unless I connect via multiple proxy or tor. I wonder is hiding PII for payment meaningful.
PIA has been tested in court as not keeping your data. Other than that you're placing trust in others, depends on what you wanna keep secret.
That's from before it got sold to Kape who has had a horrible track record with VPNs.
They're also ran by Andrew Lee/Rasengan, who killed Freenode about a month ago. So, uh, that's great.