I just did a bunch of research at https://www.reddit.com/r/VPN -- looks like Mullvad is the most recommended / highest rated.

Sweden is a member of the EU [1]. It has a 6-month data retention law [2]. Much safer to route through Norway, Switzerland or even the United States. (I use PIA [3].)

[1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/countries_en

[2] https://www.purevpn.com/blog/data-retention-laws-by-countrie...

[3] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com

Personally I would never use a US-based VPN.

Everyone has different needs. If you are a journalist building up a story against powerful adversaries, then you absolutely find a VPN provider in an impartial jurisdiction. If you are just trying to hide your browsing habits from your nosey ISP, torrent a couple movies, and latency matters at all to you, a local VPN is not a terrible choice.

Fair point.

I'm not in the US, so the local advantages don't apply, only the three-letter agency illegal snooping disadvantages.

Well, the NSA has intercepts virtually everywhere. They're drowning in data.

Well, who can you trust? Ultimately, no one.

PIA has been dissed over their promotional practices. And for using weak encryption, which allowed them to minimize resource use, and undercut competition.

But I gotta say that their no-logs victory in court is impressive!

I went looking for a spreadsheet I once saw, apparently it's become a website.

https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-section/

France runs a warrantless mass surveillance program [1]. It is one of the countries our OpSec consultant specifically recommends taking clean computers to. It is labelled, by "That One Privacy Site" as NOT being an "enemy of the Internet" (whatever that means). Difficult to take the rest of its recommendations seriously.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/05/world/europe/france-surveillan...

IDK as the methodology is open and you can just email the guy asking for this information to be included I'm not sure what the problem is.

There are a lot of lists of VPNS and though this one didn't help me choose mine, and ranks mine very low, I thought it answered the question the best.

I personally use Cloak as it was easy to set up (https://www.getcloak.com/), but I'll be adding proxy.sh (https://proxy.sh) as my primary soon (on recommendation from a few security minded friends and their logging policy).

setting up VPNs doesn't scale. the entire internet can't be behind VPNS not to mention people with poor internet will not be able to use a VPN effectively

I don't think the parent was trying to make or ask whether VPNs scale when he/she asked which VPNs are good.

thatoneprivacysite.net

On that site he has a massive spreadsheet of many if not all VPN providers and the various pros and cons.

cryptostorm seems pretty serious about what they do: https://cryptostorm.is/