Tor is better for extremely sensitive things. VPNs are better for low-level illegality. Tor is very difficult for glowies to penetrate, your data is not encrypted at all but you are effectively anonymous. VPNs offer much better speeds and practicality, with useful features like split tunnelling, but you are putting all your eggs in one basket; and no VPN company cares about protecting your privacy more than protecting themselves from glowies. There are some VPN companies like Mullvad that seem to promise quite convincingly that they don't log anything (and they accept anonymous payment) so it's conceivable that even if they were raided they wouldn't be able to give up any information on customers. VPNs like Nord and Surfshark are just asking for trouble. Avoid any VPN that advertises aggressively.
My outlook is, use a good VPN with windows for things like streaming, torrenting etc. Use Tor on linux for sensitive things.
Tor work up until you control a certain number of exit nodes. After that you can be tracked on it.
You think the NSA doesnt have a F ton of the exit nodes in house?
VPNs are also ripe for honey pots. As it effectively groups all of your traffick into a single log.
Given the inability to audit providers it's very difficult to know if usage of a VPN is effectively doing anything aside from masking your origin IP from the destination.
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