> I don't particularly care for my ISP seeing all my traffic or being tracked by the entire web. I use Mullvad to try to achieve some semblance of privacy.
But VPNs don't enhance your privacy though - you're trading your ISP's snopping for your VPN operator's snooping - and TLS makes it all irrelevant.
Yes, I need to trust the VPN provider and that's a trade I'm willing to make. My ISP has my name, address, DOB, and my SSN. My VPN provider has none of those things.
TLS solves part of the problem with ISP snooping, sure. The ISP does still know which IPs I'm accessing though and since SNI information isn't encrypted, so they may even know the hostname. There's more to it than reading the contents of sites I visit.
I'm also not fond of my ISP-issued IP trivially pin-pointing the town I live in. I'm less fond of the way trackers and advertisers use that information. Routing my traffic through a VPN addresses that point as well.
Maybe some day we'll see wide deployment of IPv6 addresses that don't reveal geographic location. Maybe some day we'll have encrypted SNI everywhere. Maybe some day 100% of all network traffic, HTTP or otherwise, will use TLS. But, we're not there today. A VPN provider is a nice stopgap measure.
I'd argue that is an enhancement of my privacy. It's had a nice secondary benefit of avoiding ISP throttling or peering disputes.
But VPNs don't enhance your privacy though - you're trading your ISP's snopping for your VPN operator's snooping - and TLS makes it all irrelevant.