For protecting privacy and security against most commercial entities, ISPs, and advertisers, a reliable traditional VPN is sufficient which is a little bit better than tor in some aspects.
Against Global Passive Adversaries, Mix Networks Are Required, While Tor Is Insufficient.
In my assessment, Tor falls short compared to mix networks at the upper end, yet traditional VPNs outperform it for basic use cases below.
There are also intermediary proxy networks such as SPN in between.
For protecting privacy and security against most commercial entities, ISPs, and advertisers, a reliable traditional VPN is sufficient which is a little bit better than tor in some aspects.
I’m not sure about this. If the goal is anonymity, choosing a VPN is simply shifting trust from your ISP to the VPN. You’re trusting your VPN provider to not track your browsing and not surrender your traffic history to authorities when pressured.
As for privacy from advertisers, VPNs don’t really help much at all. They’re using fingerprinting, cookies, and other signals to track you. Hence something like tor browser is needed.