I do have experience in these areas (torrenting for a long time though not at all in the past several years, read TorrentFreak over the years, followed Snowden, etc.), but have never personally bought access to a VPN, even though I feel like I **should ** have been using one since like 2008.
I familiar with most terms and concepts, I know to look for non-FVEY/SSEUR jurisdictions only, strict no-log, network killswitch, pay with cash/crypto, DNS leak protection as a bonus, etc.
I am wondering which service you all have decided to go with.
Mullvad is a bunch of cool Swedish weirdos who are generally explicit about the political nature of their business. No logging, no accounts tied to anything but a random number, cash/crypto payments, and a network killswitch in their app if you choose to use that.
They’re also an early supporter of WireGuard and have it deployed extensively.
Downside: They’re in a 14 Eyes jurisdiction. I don’t really care about this for my purposes. A VPN - no matter how well-chosen - is relatively weak protection and shouldn’t be construed as an effective privacy solution on its own.
Just got an email about Mozilla's new VPN that uses Mullvad's servers but I'm not sure why I shouldn't just use Mullvad directly. At least buying from Mullvad means nothing is tied to my Firefox account
Without knowing more about it, I can't really say. It lacks some features I'd like to see, and I personally wouldn't want to put all my eggs in one proverbial basket. But good on them for picking a well-regarded partner and an excellent newish technology.