VPNs can certainly be useful to hide your identity from a specific host and probably to hide your browsing habits from your ISP but does probably nothing agains

VPNs can certainly be useful to hide your identity from a specific host and probably to hide your browsing habits from your ISP but does probably nothing against the Government (ie: if the NSA logs all packets worldwide, it should be trivial to connect the dots). But I prefer to use tor in my case.