Oh yeah! It’s sad that users have to have a technical education to use the Internet if laws and what at least I perceive as “right” fundamentally differ.

At least for the moment it’s only copy right for me personally - there are countries and laws where this need is way more fundamental :(

No it doesn’t. Because it’s not an opinion but a description on how to not get into the situation you’ve described - i.e. about personal security.

What I’ve described prevents a link between you and your online actions - that’s the whole point. It’s the defense against surveillance and can be applied on situations with way higher risk than just a fine.

Yeah that’s way more specific and can get behind - I don’t even test any “free” VPNs.

I didn’t intend to imply that VPNs are free.

“most of them are (if advertised heavily)” is quite a claim without data to back it up.

At least for the one I tested none of them sent additional traffic over my connection. That’s just one data point and I only looked to ones with port forwarding but still far away from your claim.

There are a shitload of VPN tests out there and testing id your connection gets used by third parties for not traffic is even possible for a layperson.

Please stop fear mongering without remedies or specifics.

That’s what VPNs are there for! Ze German setup: gluetun and qbittorrent via docker, qbittorrent only going over gluetuns network.

This way we can return what we take tenfold and still come out on top!