It’s a small step out of many. And there’s enough steps now that an average person is pretty much never going to have it, unfortunately. But there is more and less exposed. There’s untraceable, and there’s traceable with more effort than anyone will likely bother. Considering countries like russia have tried and failed to block VPNs, they’re certainly worth something.
To be clear, a VPN provider effectively works the same way as an ISP. If you use a Dutch VPN, it will follow the exact same rules as a Dutch ISP. Given, you should verify that it actually is based out of that location and not just incorporated there with no office and a PO box. In a DMCA situation, the DMCA agents generally are never told the identities of anyone by an ISP or VPN provider. But the ISP or VPN provider forwards the notice to the user with the associated account as they’re legally required to do. If the worst case scenario happens and you get your VPN service cut, you’ve still got your ISP and can just move to a different VPN provider. Having your ISP service cut, on the other hand, may leave you with no service options at all. You don’t get privacy with a VPN, but you do get a stopgap like that.
Edit: Also signing up for VPNs that don’t record your personal information is probably a good practice as well.
Most likely, the logs consist of what IPs are leased to what users, when the connections start and end, and what IPs those users are connecting from. A VPN company may keep the logs for something like 2 days.
Let’s say you torrent something while connected to a VPN and one of the peers in the torrent pool is actually a DMCA agent associated with IP-Echelon. The DMCA agent will record the IP address you have at the time and generate a DMCA notice. It will then look up who owns the IP address to determine where to send the DMCA notice. When the VPN company receives the DMCA notice, it will use the logs to determine who was leasing the IP address at the time in question. If the logs no longer exist, the notice effectively gets tossed because the VPN company has no way of knowing what account was downloading the torrent. But if the notice was sent quickly enough for the logs to still exist, the VPN company will forward the DMCA notice to the user that was using the IP at the time. In that case, it will work the same way as a normal ISP. You’ll probably get a warning with something like a 3 strike policy. In such a case, the VPN will cut your VPN service on the third strike.
Presumably, it could work the same way for anything. I used to work for a VPN company a decade ago, and this was pretty much the industry standard. It, like all VPN companies, advertised itself as having no logging.
I worked for a VPN company a decade ago that advertised no logging. It was all BS. They absolutely logged. Maybe they only kept the logs for something like 48 hours, but I’m pretty sure all VPNs have some kind of logging going on. Anyway, a VPN by itself does not give you any privacy. Websites have a billion ways to fingerprint you, and they don’t even need cookies to do it.
I don’t think Reddit would have that. They likely just use your browser fingerprint. Check this out: https://amiunique.org/fingerprint