While we're on the subject, are there any alternative VPNs people recommend?
I have since been a happy paying customer and also recommended it to a couple of my friends.
A shame.
It looks like the next-best guide that hasn't been corrupted by referral money is privacytools.io, which currently recommends Mullvad, ProtonVPN, and IVPN. https://www.privacytools.io/providers/vpn/
I have used both Mullvad and TunnelBear. I bought a year of TB. It's on all the time and I forget it is there.
(Except for getting around geo-blocking, of course)
But VPNs don't enhance your privacy though - you're trading your ISP's snopping for your VPN operator's snooping - and TLS makes it all irrelevant.
TLS solves part of the problem with ISP snooping, sure. The ISP does still know which IPs I'm accessing though and since SNI information isn't encrypted, so they may even know the hostname. There's more to it than reading the contents of sites I visit.
I'm also not fond of my ISP-issued IP trivially pin-pointing the town I live in. I'm less fond of the way trackers and advertisers use that information. Routing my traffic through a VPN addresses that point as well.
Maybe some day we'll see wide deployment of IPv6 addresses that don't reveal geographic location. Maybe some day we'll have encrypted SNI everywhere. Maybe some day 100% of all network traffic, HTTP or otherwise, will use TLS. But, we're not there today. A VPN provider is a nice stopgap measure.
I'd argue that is an enhancement of my privacy. It's had a nice secondary benefit of avoiding ISP throttling or peering disputes.