But couldn’t your ISP also be keeping logs? And wouldn’t it be better if the isp only saw encrypted VPN traffic? Who do you trust more your VPN or your ISP?
Changing wallets does nothing to protect your privacy. You either need to do a coinjoin or swap to XMR and back to remove any links to you.
Sorry if there’s any misunderstanding. From the r/PrivacytoolsIO Wiki (link in sidebar), and also our rules in this Sub’s settings:
13 – Due to the commercial nature of VPNs and most blockchain technologies, discussions are better directed the appropriate Subreddits. Discussing them as a category is great, advocating for individual ones not as much.
The thing is, this Sub gets much more VPN provider (and Crypto-currency-related) spam than the PT.IO site gets, and we need to protect you from it more here, than on the domains we own and control. 
PS: we also recommend interested folks check out www.thatoneprivacysite.net. It’s also a great resource!
This site is not comprehensive. It doesn’t review 80% of the VPNs out there, and its top VPNs are not to be trusted.
NordVPN? Really?
By persistence, I mean that you can store things on it. You unplug the usb and its clean. Nothing is stored.
anonymity is not not knowing what is being said. i can anonymously report something to the news for example. they don’t know who said it, but they do know what i said.
Umm… I’m not sure…
Wouldn’t privacy mean only Jane knows its Bob that’s messaging her and nobody else does? While anonymity would mean Jane also doesn’t know it’s Bob that’s messaging her?
Doesn’t that highly depend on whether or not that VPN gives shared IP’s or not? if 200 people are using the same IP its much harder to figure out what traffic belongs to who then if 5 people are using that IP.
Tor can make you stand out and people can snoop on what is sent over tor (governments run most of it) but it makes your browsing more anonymous and hard to correlate.
Though, as you said, it makes you anonymous, hence it won’t make you stand out as it depends on the situation and circumstance - especially done in bad OpSec like the childish bømb threat at Harvard (source). Relevant FAQs:
Can exit nodes eavesdrop on communications? Isn’t that bad?
Yes, the guy running the exit node can read the bytes that come in and out there. Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it makes sure to encrypt everything inside the Tor network, but it does not magically encrypt all traffic throughout the Internet.
This is why you should always use end-to-end encryption such as SSL for sensitive Internet connections. (The corollary to this answer is that if you are worried about somebody intercepting your traffic and you’re not using end-to-end encryption at the application layer, then something has already gone wrong and you shouldn’t be thinking that Tor is the problem.)
VPN can stop your ISP from accessing your traffic but just makes another address that can be tied back to you. If you are on a VPN and you always check what the weather is by your home, you are suddenly less anonymous since that traffic can be tied to your other traffic even though your VPN provider is probably more trustworthy than Tor exit nodes.
Though, the ISP won’t know anything about the other IP address used from a particular VPN provider (hence its obvious acronym, i.e. Virtual Private Network [hence nothing to do with anonymous]). So, there won’t be any collerations to you as a person. Though, somewhat true if we were to dive into attack vectors e.g. if you are a targeted person or person of interest, then every possible correlations will be considered. Say e.g. you have an account that you mostly, if not always are connected to (i.e. always signed into and are online), then the adversaries would see all the IP logs from that particular account and try to see and correlate if that corresponds back to that particular person of interest. In this case, yes, you have lost your privacy. Of course, it depends on the threat model and who the adversaries are. The weather site visited may not make you less private in this case.
Obvously, VPN and Tor have their own respective use cases; each their own benefits and drawbacks. Having a defined threat model and having had weigh-in one’s use cases, would definitely help you in the long run. r/Tor’s wiki states:
Is Tor safe, or has it been compromised?
There is no irrefutable evidence to suggest Tor is compromised.
Recent law enforcement operations have exploited human error to identify users. Victims included users running an outdated version of Tor Browser and hidden services with configuration errors.
Leaks by Edward Snowden suggest that Tor provided significant resistance for the NSA and GCHQ in the past.
Also, Snowden have said: “If you’re not using Tor you’re doing it wrong.” (Read the whole article)
In any case, yes, it’s an interesting topic to dive into and we can learn many things.
80% of the vpns are owned by one chinese shell company so no need.
I agree with you on NordVPN. Its claim to fame is that it theoretically is owned by a Panamanian corp. But their entire management team and ownership is American as is most of their infrastructure. American courts have shown no hesitation to burst and push through that bubble. And the network is misleading. I think for the most part it is just a bunch of ips domiciled on a few servers. Same as PIA.
You said the top vpns are not to be trusted. Two of them have been battle tested and passed. One of them (Swiss) really invented the best mode for running a vpn network: bare servers running in ramdisk mode. No storage and nothing to seize. And real servers in every location.
A couple I cannot speak to as I don’t know much about them.
Anyways I suggested them as a resource. By no means should they be the sole resource for anyone. But the testing is much better then the fluff done by many popular magazine sites and others solely concerned with whether they can stream Netflix and completely ignoring the vpn fundamentals.
That in some cases can be considered a feature, he wanted to be as careful as can be so…
Would you say the given definition they gave is the intersection/combination of anonymity and privacy?
No, not in the context of my example. Obviously the other person knows who you are because you’re intentionally communicating with them.
Anonymity is from an outsider perspective. Bob knows he’s messaging Jane and Jane knows she messaging Bob. Me, as an outsider, doesn’t know Bob is talking to Jane and I don’t know what they’re saying. That’s what anonymity is to most people.
Another example is Bob wants anonymous email. ProtonMail is an outsider and I’m an outsider and neither of us know Bob has his account. Obviously the person he’s intentionally emailing knows it’s Bob but PM and I don’t. That’s being anonymous (again, in this context).
I’ll admit that I can’t fully confirm whether it’s a majority right now however tor was created by the US government and we know a lot of nodes are spying: DEF CON® 24 Hacking Conference - Speakers
It seems likely that governments would want to harvest as much info as possible about tor use and therefore join the network until such a time as they can stop it being used. There’s an incentive for governments to maintain a majority and the US government was certainly in control of the majority at the point of creation.
Tor was an nsa project and they needed to hide because all the traffic was flagged as govt. Still today nsa runs most of its nodes.
Edit: I seem to have lost track of source on this. so consider this unverified and do your own research.
Depends on if the VPN keeps logs. If they have logs and provide them/leak them to somebody the external IP sharing wouldn’t protect you, otherwise it might at least fuzz things enough to make it difficult without having lots and lots of data to analyze for patterns.
Change.io or something similar morphtoken if you’re not in the USA.
80%?
Do you got a source of that statistic?
Restoreprivacy hasn’t reviewed several trusted VPNs, Mullvad, AirVPN and TorGuard for example. Both are industry vets with 7+ years of experience with no connection to China. Funny, how all of these VPNs either don’t have affiliate programs, or have very little comissions for reviewers like Sven.
But I guess having NordVPN, and Surfshark ranked 2 and 3 respectively makes sense. Oh, and ExpressVPN is #1, while also being the most expensive VPN by a far margin. Funny how all 3 of these VPNs have 100% comission rates for affiliates.
/s
kinda, but very oversimplified.
I’m still not convinced 
Say, anonymous donor, anonymous tipster, anonymous Reddit commenter… The recipient doesn’t know who the sender is even if that person is doing what he is, intentionally.
That understanding of mine would probably not let me from accepting yours.