Indeed, never pay for a VPN in order to "protect your privacy". Hey chief, passing all of your traffic to a datacenter - think that flags you in some way when you're in countries like China, Turkey, or Iran? Nah, they probably have NO idea why you're sending so many bytes to DigitalOcean or M247 or the MANY others. Think that a state-level actor can't compromise hardware in these large datacenters? The few that don't willingly hand over the keys, without the specific hosts's permission that is? I'm sure that Amazon AWS is WAY more worried about the couple hundred bucks that they get from Tailscale than they are about the billions that they get from the us gov't, for instance. There are other ways ad hosts track you, from cookies, to the favicon exploit, to other durable identifiers that don't give a solitary fuck about your IP - even in passing. VPN's aren't magic 'hacker shields' either no matter how much your favorite podcast host shills them as such. Your traffic to any even REMOTELY competently set up service (often even if the CEO's stepson Jeff set it up!) is already encrypted. At BEST, they might get what site you're trying to access. Using a decent encrypted DNS server (there's a bunch of ways to do this), they don't even get that. The best use case for them is keeping your ISP from shutting your service off for torrenting (learn to nntp) the latest Marvel movie. This is about the extent that your ISP cares about your traffic. Depending on the ISP, they might not even give this many fucks. Everything else is just security theater. If it makes you feel better, that's great, I guess. I mean, that, and the intended purpose of tunneling into a secure network to access resources that you wish not expose to the general internet. Think before you do. If a claim sounds too good to be true - it probably is.