I don’t really have anything to back this up except a nagging feeling that all the marketing, hype, and buzzwords simply aren’t true.
Local ISPs have legal restrictions from the federal down to the local level in terms of how they handle your data. You give them a huge monthly bill. You are their customer. AFAIK VPNs operate without any legal requirements. They can say whatever they want. I flat out don’t believe their marketing about privacy, logging, or otherwise. They can pay youtubers to say whatever they want.
In fact I’d go so far as to say someone is pushing for everyone to get a VPN. By all means access your everything through an unregulated server run by an unknown entity that can do whatever it wants.
You just hit the nail on the head...
Use your absolute proof that it's you credit card to pay for 'anonymity'......
Only trust free VPN's, if you pay for it you are leaving more of a trace if anyone ever decides to trace you...
Epic Privacy Browser is free and comes with built in VPN's sorted by geo-location, quick and easy way of online activity on the clearnet when you don't want to be easily trackable(certainly not even remotely secure but it does make things a bit harder for them and potentially a much harder trace than a paid VPN)
Same way TOR nodes are financed(and there are a hell of a lot of more TOR nodes than the 10 or so free VPN's in epic, and it's a small browser so bandwith is unlikely to be that huge and even less that Opera which has 2.3% of the market)