You Don't Need a VPN
perezbox.comThe picture is slightly more nuanced. What's your exposure from browsing a web page or your mobile phone? Your IP address alone is enough for companies that use network provided APIs obtain your full billing information, location information, and more:
https://medium.com/@philipn/want-to-see-something-crazy-open...
And having a VPN can let you do away with some of the more questionable third party tools that let you manage things at home. I could pay some cloud provided service to let me manage security cameras at home or I could have a VPN and access them like local resources and keep more of my data in-network.
Does not work if you use wifi instead of cellular.
I'm going to say the quiet part loud: The main use cases for a VPN are BitTorrent and changing regions on streaming sites. For which they provide a necessary and valuable service. But since they can't say "Download any movie only $4/mo" in their ads, we get "military-grade encryption" instead.