I can't give you a checklist for how you should determine who you trust -- that's one of the reasons why I don't advocate for or endorse any particular VPN, and

I can't give you a checklist for how you should determine who you trust -- that's one of the reasons why I don't advocate for or endorse any particular VPN, and one of the reasons why I don't disclose which VPN providers I use. The difficulty of determining which VPNs to trust is why I call them a "least-bad solution" rather than a "good solution." There are a few other people on this post who are recommending specific VPNs, and you can (and should) look through some of their justifications for why they like their providers. A couple of things you can look into if you want to know where to start: - What technologies are they using, contributing to, etc? Do they have a good rapport with Open Source communities? - Do they support OpenVPN/wireguard? I advocate against using a custom VPN client, I don't want my provider to ever touch my computer, only my traffic. - What's their privacy policy look like? Do they make public commitments to destroy logs? Are their claims on-their-face absurd? There's no such thing as a VPN that does zero logging at all, so if someone is claiming perfect anonymity, I distrust them from the get-go. - Have they had data breaches in the past (for example, NordVPN)? - Are there any high-profile cases of them refusing to provide logs to someone? - What country are they located in? Depending on the country, a foreign VPN can complicate collusion efforts. - Do they pay for ads, and how do they advertise? Do they make inaccurate guarantees about what a VPN can and can't do? A VPN isn't going to protect you from the police, and a VPN on its own will not make you private, so I distrust companies that make those claims. - Do they seem competent? Do they have instructions on how to deal with things like DNS leaks, or how to set up killswitches? That's not an exhaustive list. It is absolutely a pain to determine trust -- this is the biggest problem with 3rd-party VPNs. Don't go crazy with it; a VPN is just one layer in your privacy setup, so it's OK to have something imperfect. Don't aim for perfect privacy, aim for "better than what I currently have."