On: How to find a trustworthy VPN service

Yeah, now your VPN provider can instead. So much better.

The whole point of the article is that you need to do your research and choose someone that won't do that to you.

There's no way for them to guarantee that to you. It's just 100% marketing wank. If you want privacy use Tor or similar.

Unless you just setup your own VPN? Or maybe trust external auditors? Or otherwise spend time actually looking into service providers before giving them your money?

Setting up your own is better for doing it privately - takes out an unnecessary extra party at least. Still not perfect of course, the data center and ISPs can still see your traffic and connections on both sides, so still cannot be considered truly private.

Interesting that you say "external auditors" though - have any commercial VPN providers offered anything like that? Of course, it'd only be worth something if they'd put their money where their mouths are in a form of insurance payout if they were wrong.