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Briefly, law requires establishing probable cause, that _one_ specific person has done specific things, to underwrite search warrant. VPN IPs are shared between users, meaning any one of the ~X00 users sharing a single ip could be doing any number of things at the same time.

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Briefly, non-US jurisdictions are not US jurisdictions and have different standards and procedures.

I think the comment was made under the assumption the user lives in a place with a reasonably fair legal system. Of course all bets are off if you don't.

If an app phones home at 11:00 AM and the illegal act is at 11:01 AM wouldn't it narrow down the list of suspects considerably?

No, because at the same time x number of users have their apps phoning home with what appears to be the same IP

How can you be sure that you are the only one in your country not connected to the same IP address provided by a VPN server?

Well if they have ISP flow logs, that'll be trickier because it will enable very granular inspection of the traffic and the timings of that traffic.

However if they are trying to cast a wide net and inquire Google and other service providers for it, that will lead to a lot of collusions and they won't be able to tell it is from country A because it is from the VPN.

Are you sure x is sufficiently large?

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