People hate to hear this, I do too many times, but I have been working with computers for four decades now. I learned about them from the bottom up, I do not think I ever actually bought a complete system ever.
I always built my own. I learned from binary to hexadecimal to decimal, what the difference between bits and bytes, the whole nine or ten yards. I have run web-servers for twenty years almost, the computer that this article is on lives in my office, not in some remote 'server farm' owned by somebody else. I know how the internet works and how servers work, especially what data of yours they store as a default. I don't use cookies on my site, but that is a whole other element to your security on the web.
So when I saw this proliferation of folks selling you "security" on the internet via a Virtual Private Network, I just laughed. I've set up and used my own simple VPN's many times. The thing is, it is still just another computer in the path of your internet usage. A computer that stores your IP and then every IP it has assigned to you. In other words, the people who own the VPN have massive amounts of data they collect from you. All one need to do is hack the VPN to get at you. Very simple, right? Yes, it can be. I mean, the .gov gets hacked all the time, you think your VPN is immune?
Here are two videos that pretty much lay it all out. I sure hope you stop and think before wasting your money on any VPN service from here on out. I never have, and never will.
Here is an article from a different source:
