Not for anything bad, just sort of tired of all the data mining going and lack of online privacy in the world today.
Is there a trustworthy and good one to use?
Websites used to store cookies in flash, which weren't cleared, even when you "cleared all cookies," I'm not even sure reinstalling your browser cleared them.
Then there are things like google analyitcs and tracking pixels. The google login window. Captchas can betray your identity. The "referrer" header when clicking links.
There are all manner of cookies and fingerprinting techniques.
Screen size is detectable, installed fonts, installed plugins.
This is an EFF project to show you how easily your browser is fingerprint-able: https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/
If privacy is deeply concerning to you then I would spend way more effort on your browser than your IP.
You also have to consider that chrome, firefox, and safari all want to sync your web history to their clouds and all manner of other stuff.
When someone shares you a link on messenger, FB will click that link and download its contents to their servers for analysis.
Your phone reports your location to your carrier that sells that information.
Bluetooth can betray your identity when walking around.
Any picture can have facial idea and OCR run against it.
The only solutions to this problem of privacy are regulations.
I liked when they silently changed it from "panoptoclik" because they realized the BDSM overtones were getting a bit much.
With that said, if I were to use a VPN, I would go with Mullvad.
I have used several and currently use Proton. Affordable, easy to use, no-logging, and they seem to have a deep commitment to privacy.
There's not too much reason to use a VPN (for web browsing) outside of that imho. The privacy gains are at the cost of a single point of failure and its just a matter of time until EvilCo acquires your favorite VPN.
I’ve had no trouble with stability, nor any complaints the entire time of my 2-year subscription and I was connected to it probably 90% of the time. They would be my first choice if I wanted a VPN provider.
If you use things like Tor inside the VPN, you'll have all those circuits collapsed into one tunnel -- a tunnel often tied to your credit card or whatever :-)
It's easy to use and if it's just about hiding your IP address to a web host, this may be sufficient.
Note: You can use Tor to hide your IP (some services block Tor, unfortunately)
What do you recommend setting up?
I paid for a VPN a few years ago, Windscribe ... I do not recommend, no sooner had a week gone by I found it pointless at any public hot spots in my locale - no real connection - no bandwidth. I wrote a few times to support but got nothing back except shrugs, maybe reinstall etc. When I need to, I now use a ssh tunnel via a server (actually a seedbox that allowed access to cli tools) which was about $5 usd a month. Though a lot more expensive for my needs it beats a ssh server account.
No, seriously.
