Privacy

Yeah, but this is just shifting the trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. Any reputable VPN will post third-party audits to show that they’re not keeping logs and are RAM-only servers. But even then, the VPN can 100% see what sites you’re visiting, and can link them back to you if they really want to.

Tor is more like cascaded VPN servers, where (unless the same group owns all three servers in the cascade) identifying who is accessing what is very difficult. Because the entry point (the first VPN server) sees you, and some encrypted traffic from the second node. The second node only sees encrypted traffic to and from the first and third servers. The exit point (third server) only sees the encrypted traffic from the second server, and who the traffic is going to. So unless you own at least the first and third hop (and perform a relatively complex timing attack, to match the traffic entering the network with the traffic exiting the network) then there’s no good way to tell what you specifically are accessing.