This is my fear.

The more significant concern is if you are the other side: if you deliberately run some sort of VPN or other proxy that others can use, or less deliberately do so. Many hacked or otherwise suspicious browser add-ons, and other malware, will make HTTP(S) requests & other connections on behalf of their C&C hosts and to your ISP or anyone else those requests will be largely indistinguishable from those that are the result of your activity.

You need a VPN that actually cares about your privacy and goea the extra mile to ensure it. On top of that if the VPN service does not know who you are how can they actually tell the cops. On top of that you don't need to explain it to the cops - if you are ever accused this should be done in a court of law where we understand what ips are (heck, even some cops understand it - it's not exactly rocket science nowadays)

Unless you're in the UK, in which case: "You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence."

A number that rounds to zero in the 21st century is the number of people who have been randomly cancelled. You can disagree that it is proportionate to their offense, but z e r o people were just sitting around and woke up a) in the public eye and b) were completely and entirely good people who were maligned needlessly in a permanent way.

It is in no way a real concern for 99.9999999% of people.

Demonstrably false. There are a significant number of individual cases I could mention off the top of my head. If you want a whole bag of them to look at in one go, read up on the NOTW “name and shame” campaign which resulted in numerous entirely spurious accusations, and actual vigilante attacks as well as legal investigations. The court of public option can be a concern for all.

> b) were completely and entirely good people

On a slightly more facetious note: if anyone claims to be absolutely 100% totally good, someone somewhere will disagree :)

There is no objective definition of good that all will agree on, and even if there are none of us are perfect our entire lives.

Nobody has been cancelled randomly, and I genuinely pity people who go through life fearful such a thing could happen to them.

You: “It happens to a small number of people, there are many many more people than that, so it averages out to effectively zero, so no one needs to worry”

Me: “Toe stubbing only happened to a small number of people, there are many many more people than that, so it averages out to effectively zero, so no one needs to be careful about their feet”

HHGTTG: “the volume of the universe is infinite there must be an infinite number of worlds. But not all of them are populated; therefore only a finite number are. Any finite number divided by infinity is zero, therefore the average population of the Universe is zero, so the total population must be zero and any people you may meet are just figments of a deranged imagination”

> However, had they taken something, it would not have given them access to any customer information.

> These are the national laws that makes it possible to run a privacy-focused VPN service in Sweden:

Years ago I handled fraud cases for an e-commerce site with local police, at some point they started asking for IP and port numbers for the offenders, rather than just the IP. Turns out that one of the cellular phone providers had basically run out of IPv4 addresses for their 4G network and did some NAT solution. If you didn't have the port number the client had connected from then they could only tell you which cell tower had been used, not who the customer was.