>>306Tor is anonymity network, to pretty much higher extent that in fact in order to find people using Tor, police resides to plain old Sherlock Holmes methods of deducing humans, not technology.
By using certain applications over Tor with all precautions such as anonymizing their user-agents if it comes to things like IRC clients, you get a guaranteed anonymity of location, and with more people using said tools the way you use them, anonymity of intent. With today's Tor's speeds (up to 1MB/s), high efficient codecs and not so big overall size of YouTube's videos, downloading or streaming them over tor is rather convenient.
About VPNs. There are basically 2 types of VPNs your average Joe can afford today. Something company-owned, pre-configured, with many locations in Hong Kong and Novosibirsk. Long story short, no matter how much you pay them, no matter what they state in their Terms of Privacy Policy, they do sell your browsing information to advertisers, they keep your logs for the police, dot. Second, even if they don't, how hard is it to map all exit servers which in fact do NOT provide as much anonymity set as Tor does simply because of their quantity, affiliated to one VPN provider and correlate them with users hopping from one IP to another. One mistake, and you're busted, I mean, written in databases of Google forever. When it comes to self-hosted VPN, it's even worse, you have 1 static ipv4 address and /64 for ipv6 is basically the same.
