Personally, given the kinds of friends I have, a VPN hides my traffic from them when I’m on their WiFi. But I don’t need a commercial VPN for this.
This is kind of my point - now if a law enforcement or security service wants to get access to a treasure trove of traffic and analytics that is likely significantly more interesting to them than general ISP traffic they send an NSL or equivalent to a VPN provider and have it all nice a collected for them. That said, DoH appears to finally be gaining some traction (default on Firefox, IIRC).
Hah, I’m a little curious about what kinds of friends you have for this to be of concern :).
This cat and mouse game has been going on for a while. I actually subscribed to Expressvpn for my kid, who likes to watch tv in the languages he grew up with: he says their customer support is really good for this use case. (This reminds me he’s now old enough to pay for this himself).
It's odd to me that they have pivoted to marketing VPNs for out-of-region TV, because that's against the terms of service of pretty much every streaming provider. I guess if the ads don't mention a name, they can say "oh we expected you to find a streaming service where that's not illegal, not use Netflix."