For all of the folks trying to find the "best" VPN, I highly recommend checking out
this VPN comparison here. This is an unvarnished, unpaid breakdown of a ton of VPNs, and you can download the CSV and view offline.
It lays out all of the features and privacy aspects of each provider, which you'll see that in many cases, they do not have your best interests or privacy as their top priority. Pretty much every search done for "best vpn provider reviews" is going to come back with the same basic results for the companies that have the best (or shadiest) affiliate programs, meaning that they pay for those reviews. And if it's a free VPN, you are most likely the product so be very careful. There are also a lot of paid reviews out there to trash other VPN providers, but the link I provided simply gives a breakdown each service from a privacy perspective, with some performance info.
My personal opinion, based on my experience, is that Mullvad is a very good service, and takes privacy seriously. It's a little more expensive, but works great on Mac and iPhone (using the OpenVPN client and downloading profiles). Between Mullvad, Nord, Vypr, Express and ProtonVPN, Mullvad consistently has the best speeds where I live in the US. I pay for all of the above, and use them for different, very specific things, but Mullvad is the best for privacy and performance. Again - just my opinion on Mullvad. Not trying to sell it. My #2 would be Proton.
Side topic: As I sit here typing this, I'm watching the process "expressvpnd" in the LS network monitor (app is NOT running), and since I reset the rule about an hour ago it has attempted to connect to 190 different servers or ipv4 addresses (probably every one of their servers worldwide), plus google, evernote, carbon60, steamcdn, lowes.com, scorecardsearch, multiple cloudfront addresses,
and the app isn't even open! This last client update introduced some not-so-good features that I hadn't noticed before, but it ExpressVPN work well on my DDWRT router when I was using it for that purpose. Desktop client a little shady though.
