3rd party VPN privacy

[OVERKILL]

I’m not saying people need this stuff, but to call it totally worthless?

Quoting myself:

If I was doing a pentest from a burner or a liveDVD (just for the sake of an example) so the hardware itself is totally blank slate and was trying to spoof a COO to maybe check if geoblocking was working or not, then a VPN of this type can be useful. However, that's not the usage profile of Joe Average home user.

Nobody is saying it's "totally worthless", there are several use cases as long as you understand the limitations. But this stuff is monetized, which shouldn't surprise anyone. Amazon is now putting ads on Prime Video for Pete's sake, and you are already paying for that! Targeted advertising is accounted for within the TOS for most of these services, since it's not actually "monitoring", it's just an algorithm tracking DNS query trends (and perhaps some other stuff) and directing ads accordingly.