VPNs are a complete red herring placebo, promoted intentionally to distract you from TOR. TOR is one of the only legitimate anonymizing technologies.
Connecting to your own VPN on a VPS is miles better than a retail VPN service, but even for that I wonder what threat model it serves.
• You can ban outgoing unencrypted network traffic without a VPN (a VPN doesn't solve this either btw).
• You can use DNS-over-TLS without a VPN; that solves a big part of traffic analysis.
• If you only have one VPS and only ever connect through that one tunnel, all you accomplished was moving your effective IP to another place. Oh, and you added an extra counterparty in the middle.
The utility of VPNs is, almost as a dumb proxy, to patch malicious/missing functionality from your first-party connection, e.g.: you live in a country that bans IP ranges outside of its borders, your ISP bans BitTorrent traffic, or your ISP is more cooperative with LEO than your VPN provider is. This has nothing to do with anonymization. The VPN or VPS knows who you are.
Connecting to your own VPN on a VPS is miles better than a retail VPN service, but even for that I wonder what threat model it serves.
• You can ban outgoing unencrypted network traffic without a VPN (a VPN doesn't solve this either btw).
• You can use DNS-over-TLS without a VPN; that solves a big part of traffic analysis.
• If you only have one VPS and only ever connect through that one tunnel, all you accomplished was moving your effective IP to another place. Oh, and you added an extra counterparty in the middle.
The utility of VPNs is, almost as a dumb proxy, to patch malicious/missing functionality from your first-party connection, e.g.: you live in a country that bans IP ranges outside of its borders, your ISP bans BitTorrent traffic, or your ISP is more cooperative with LEO than your VPN provider is. This has nothing to do with anonymization. The VPN or VPS knows who you are.
It's a confusion between privacy and anonymity.