> If you need to hide all of your traffic from other users in your local network, you can accomplish that in a trust-no-one fashion by running your own VPN endpoint on a server you control which provides better privacy guarantees compared to a centralised commercial VPN whose business model will eventually involve selling your data (once user growth stops but shareholders demand continued revenue growth).

Well not really. There was a great (german) interview with the perfect privacy founders recently [1]. They seem to be decent guys with close ties to the Chaos Computer Club and I strongly suspect they wouldn't want to work like that.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMr0gJvI-6I

> But if you need to hide your traffic from anybody but your peer on the internet and you need to hide the fact that you talked to that peer, then, I'm afraid, your out of luck.

Nah, that one is easy just use an anonymous sim card or an open wifi and your good to go.

Honestly these discussions often feel pretty asinine to me. I personally use paid VPNs to pirate to my hearts content, work around my ISPs terrible networking and a little bit of geo-unblocking. Of course you can't use these services to protect yourself from three letter agency type surveillance or equally powerful threat actors but if they are "private" enough to block the music industry and their lawyers from suing you that's a pretty high standard of privacy, certainly more than any ISP alone gives you!