Run it yourself, or have it managed by someone you trust.

As a massively inferior but better-than-nothing fallback, contractual agreements.

Otherwise, you can't.

If you are running your own private VPN, how is that any different than your normal connection? All you are doing is basically switching ISPs. All of the traffic can still be tracked back to you, the owner of the VPN server.

Depends where you install the VPN... https://prq.se/?p=services would be a good choice

I trust (ex.) AWS or Digital Ocean more than AT&T or Comcast.

If you run it yourself, what the heck is the point? The ISP of the VPN will log you.

To both you and cortesoft: ISPs (and the countries they reside in) don't all share everything. They don't all have the same, or even compatible, rules, legal regimes, or economic interests. In particular, the economic drivers of last-mile ISPs vs backbone providers to major data centers are vastly different.

Therefore routing across multiple independent networks (which is what a VPN is) actually does provide some additional privacy protection because it means that coordination between multiple entities is now required to see the same information that would have been available to one before, and it changes which entity with which economic interests can see the most.

Essentially, it's a competition hack. There is massive competition (and customer responsiveness) when you get close to the core, but very little for most people at the last mile. So a VPN allows you to shift you effective entry point to an arbitrary provider, and that can be quite helpful.

I also wonder what impact having a US-based VPN provider vs. an EU one makes with regards to jurisdiction, privacy laws, etc.

How can you make sure level3, AWS, DO or anyone else doesn't log everything too ;)

I would expect that they do. I'm not really offended that my traffic is logged by someone and could be traced back to me by someone with the time and resources (law enforcement?).

But assuming that AWS/DO, and their uplink providers (L3, etc) have the goal of selling reliable servers and internet, and aren't building up consumer ad profiles to sell me stuff/sell my data if it looks like one server or IP is maybe a VPN.

You can't as well; you're just moving trust some place else. Choose your own poison :)

You can't. Trust is trust.