Not really. What if it's your VPN? Mine allows me access to my home network, which is its primary focus, but it also obfuscates what my phone is doing online, and blocks trackers.
(Adguard home and wireguard)
It also lets me use my phone on 4chan... so there's that.
If you're of the few people on earth to care enough and knows enough to set it's own vpn, sure. but otherwise, NordVPN gonna still sponsor youtubers and lure people into a false sense of privacy.
It’s that simple. If you don’t have your own firewall, you can just deploy Tailscale on all devices you want to be able to communicate with each other, which uses Wireguard under the hood.
As someone who manages a tailscale network at my work...I just want to point out that tailscale is a tiny bit more complicated than just downloading and installing. Not much but...
That said the ability to automate wireguard connections is wonderful and everyone should check it out.
I don't have any evidence to the contrary, but in general it's suspicious when a company markets features like that so hard when there's no reliable way an outsider can verify that the claim is accurate (still)
I remember this, and a quick google corroborates, that they've had 3 independent 3rd party audits and have been verified each time as not keeping activity logs. I think they're one of the good ones.
It's an oximoron in every company which make money with surveillance advertisings. Google undoubtedly has apps and services with a very high quality and often without real competition or alternative, but this has a very high cost and if the main income, apart from some paid services, is based on selling user data to advertising companies, it is logical and almost inevitable that it becomes a data moloch that uses any dirty trick to obtain these.
It is an axiom: power corrupts