Thanks everyone for the answers.

I use a VPN for privacy purposes as well as practical ones. If you are on public WiFi (such as hotels, coffee shops) then the administrators of those networks can watch your traffic. if its HTTPS they can't see the content, just the name of the site you are accessing, but if its HTTP they can read everything.

but I also use it so that I can always be coming out of the same IP address (as someone mentioned earlier). If I am in the US, or Cambodia, or Brazil, every one of the websites i use think "same chicago IP address, don't challenge this guy with additional steps to login". (Such as requiring an SMS/phone call to a US number which he doesn't have reception for.)

And you can't be 100% certain that the company you are using actually is Storing no logs, and isn't a secret CIA operation. But its either trust a company, of which you can do research on and whose business model depends on them being privacy-centric, or its trust that the IT guy at the Marriott is not watching your traffic, and trust that the Starbucks router that hasnt been updated in 7 years also magically hasn't been compromised in that time (and is controlled via remote Command and Control server)