The rationale stated for this work is preventing ISPs from being able to monitor and potentially sell information about Internet usage, which is reasonable and worthwhile. But by hosting a VPN with a third party, haven't we simply reassigned the same responsibility to someone else rather than absolve it? Is Digital Ocean more trustworthy than, say Cox Communications? How is this risk to be calculated, especially by a layperson?

I believe low-latency anonymizing networks like Tor might be a better more suited for accomplishing the task of obscuring one's own network traffic. In fact, I'm typing this comment from Firefox with uBlock Origin configured to use a Tor SOCKS proxy which is always running locally - eliminating ads and making little attributable netflow in my wake.