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I think it would work somewhat well for some stuff if used correctly if you're using a VPN from a foreign country not affiliated with the west. Like Russia or China (this is essentially a component of what "Tor" ie onion routing is). I think if you're willing to give up many online conveniences it's probably very easy to be completely "untraceable" online. And the mass surveillance stuff is mass surveillance, like recording all the internet traffic of random people in Afghanistan or the US or wherever. Even if the government has access to the private keys of every certificate authority in the world (they probably have a lot of them), it would still be hard to spy on you. Of course if you aren't doing "opsec" then it's super easy to track people. They're probably scraping everything about every user of this site right now, simply by recording Cloudflare traffic. But using a VPN is a preeeetty good way of hiding your identity, as long as you don't do anything revealing of your identity while you're connected to said foreign VPN. But like OutrageousHairdo points out, if you do literally anything else on the same computer, it's futile. Actually, I guess even a foreign VPN is compromisable if they don't use the proper method to connect to it, or if the govt modifies the VPN program in an update or something.