[Leviathan]

Heyo,
it should be obvious by now, especially after the latest takedowns but please do NOT trust any VPN / Socks provider that is based in any country that is forced to log or can be forced to log active connections.
Even Mullvad etc that claim to not log have to provide active logs of the current session (if there is any reason to surveil a suspect) if authorities have a warrant, even if it is for a tiny bit of time but in the end they still do. While this is a very rare case, it is still a possible situation that you might find yourself in so please be aware of it.

There are many easy ways to actually get non logging vpns, one of the easiest ones would be renting a vps somewhere in a country that has no law that tells them to forward anything (russia, maldovia, thailand etc) and also obviously pay via anything non traceable... aka crypto via a mixer etc. It can be as cheap as spending 3-5 bucks per month.
While it's still not 100% secure (there is nothing like 100% secure tho), it's as safe as it could be.

[Drako]

The average person shouldn't even need to use a VPN. The two best use cases for a VPN I can think of are torrenting, and accessing region blocked content. And your average person won't even be torrenting. If you're serious about anonymity, Tor solutions would be better. But even Tor nodes can be compromised.

And marketing can be very misleading if you don't understand the technology. Making a connection to a website over HTTPS means traffic is already encrypted. VPN companies like Nord like to mislead people with the "military grade encryption" thing.