The author screws up big on the VPN vs government issue. Let me illustrate the points made. 1. The government's laws/policies are a threat to users' privacy.

The author screws up big on the VPN vs government issue. Let me illustrate the points made. 1. The government's laws/policies are a threat to users' privacy. 2. You can currently use VPN's to protect your privacy. 3. People point out that the VPN's might lie to you willingly or under compulsion by LEO's w/ existing surveillance legislation. The same LEO's that Snowden leaks say compelled secret backdoors in all kinds of products and services. 4. "That may be the case, but it's an easily solvable problem." Lol. If it was so easy, we wouldn't have a surveillance state or it would be well-regulated based on GAO's reports. Instead, we do have one, VPN providers might be compelled by it, market choice doesn't change that, and you're still essentially hoping via a numbers game that you don't pick a bad one. This isn't even considering the fact that ISP's beholden to US TLA's might ban VPN's or require their assistance for decryption/tracking. The VPN's could be a decent solution if a very popular one was a non-profit in a non-surveillance state with protections for consumers built into its charter, contract, whatever. People who were previously shown trustworthy [enough] would have to operate it. The endpoints and monitoring would have to be strong. It would need enough traffic from each country to obscure the users. If it wasn't getting enough, they could pull trick from high-assurance's book to do fixed-rate, fixed-sized transmission constantly from the apps. That would get expensive on bandwidth side, though. So, it's doable to make VPN's useful until law or ISP policies start killing them. Just hard to evaluate who if any are doing all the above to be trustworthy enough. For now, you're throwing dice for a probabilistic level of protection that's hard to quantify.