This is such a deeply misleading statement. Privacy fundamentally is about keeping things private ... from someone. If that someone is everyone, then nothing

This is such a deeply misleading statement. Privacy fundamentally is about keeping things private ... from someone. If that someone is everyone, then nothing is private. Any sufficiently powerful entity can just overpower you, torture you into submission, guarantee a backdoor into a system you thought was cryptographically private, etc. I for one do pay for a VPN service, because it keeps my home traffic stream private from some people - namely my ISP - with high probability. It also obfuscates various types of traffic I generate and makes it harder, though I agree not impossible, to collate my traffic into a usable form for spying agencies. For me that’s easily worth paying ~$100/year for someone else to manage, and if they base their business reputation on not collecting logs, etc., there’s enough incentive to trust that while also staying vigilant to verify what I can and switch providers if they are shown to be lying. Self-hosting a vpn is utterly not an alternative for my use case, not even for technical reasons as I am an engineer who works on production web services all day. Just from a cost effectiveness / value POV, third party vpn vendors are a good solution for me.