ProtonVPN or Private Internet Acess?

You are correct, VPNs aren’t enough.
If you were being watched by an agency, you’d need more than that.
If you want to keep your browsing private from data gatherers like google and facebook, your browsing habits would betray you, it’s possible to unanonymize users, I just read an article about that in the morning.
I just use them to access geoblocked content.
edit: not saying there’s no good use for them, just saying that they require effort from the user too.

edit 2: specifically answering your question, a vpn “creates a secure, encrypted connection, which can be thought of as a tunnel, between your computer and a server operated by the VPN service”

I actually own both, I’d say go with PIA for the time being. PIA is just a bit more fleshed out IMO, more options, bit more stable, and faster servers overall. I’m going to give Proton’s a little more time to mature before thinking about switching.

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VPNs provide protection in transit, in that, as you suggest, the information is protected from your computer to the VPN end point.

It wont protect you from the VPN end point to the end server your trying to reach. The end server will still be able to collect information about you (if they want to), but would not have IP address information except from the VPN.

It’s common knowledge for the most part that your browser alone can in a lot of cases uniquely identify you.

So what you get is protection in transit from your computer to VPN end point, and some IP address protection from the end destination your connecting to.

This is still useful becuase in reality most places dont collect huge ammounts of data about your browser that would uniquely identify you. It still protects you when for example you may want to hide your data from government data collection laws (UK for example).

Combined with VPNs that have no logging and are in good countries with good data laws means even if someone tried to find you all they might end up with is a VPN IP address and come basic telemetry from servers you connected to (assuming they identied them).

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Here’s a page with some insights into the data laws in some countries, that Eden and others touched on;

https://privacytoolsio.github.io/privacytools.io/#ukusa

The VPN section is right below that. I am not knowledgeable enough to verify the accuracy of all the information there, do the research for the part you need, and dependencies.

Probably the best thing you can do is use dd-wrt router/software http://topsecur.com/vpn/what-is-dd-wrt/