Consider it meta data leak when using legacy anything.  

 I suppose there’s no benefit anyway when you download the app from the appstore. I just wanted to understand their reasoning  

 You link your Bitcoin activity to the legacy world where kyc and meta data run rampent. Your government thanks you.  

 The appstore doesn’t accept bitcoin 🤣🤣 

 The appstore doesn’t accept bitcoin, so I’m not linking bitcoin to anything. 🤣🤣 

 Nothing is secure, if the tHreE leTteR people want to know, they'll know🤷🏻‍♂️. 

 I guess your right, I just wanted to understand the reasoning for that.  

 It's largely a fallacy and just a selling point for the VPN in question.  

 That’s what I was thinking  

 Lightning works very well for this use case. 

 Except for not offering strong privacy.

How do I as a user calculate the Anon set that I'm hiding in when making an LN transaction? 

 I might argue that inability to unambiguously calculate an anon set is a positive - systems which don't create permanent global records of usage are ceteris paribus *more* private.
There are obviously counter arguments. But I will say that, the fact that LN is fast and cheap is the 'special sauce' that makes its particular version of privacy attractive to me. Many academic studies have already pointed out ways it can be attacked actively, it is true, so I don't claim it's even close to perfect, but it actually has 'cover traffic' in the loosest sense by being fast and cheap, and for everyday users that may end up mattering more. 

 interesting take. Thanks for writing that all out.

It seems like the jury is still out on it. 
I'm not sure how much the privacy gained is just "private because nobody is looking."

did you see this one?
https://d.nostr.build/0ua3oxgiHkycwJz8.pdf 

 No, looks interesting. Censorship resistance is pretty clearly going to be far weaker in such a system just by common sense. And btw "private because nobody is looking" is not a good summary of what I was saying there :) 

 No I understand that.
Also certainly common sense that systems that don't have this sort of quantifiable metadata can be more private.

But also, as it is right now,
maybe just private because nobody is looking. 

 Security and privacy is not the same.

You can use VPNs for privacy reasons, and in such case, it makes sense if you pay in a private way.

Otherwise you leak personal data to your VPN providers. And if you want to stay private, it is better to stay private even in front of your VPN provider. Better providers allows it. 

 I mean, the options is nice, i just wanted to understand the reason underneath. 
I guess there’s no use for me since I download the app from the appstore anyway.  

 Because to be super secure, not only should they not know what websites you visit, but also they should not know who their customers are in the first place.

Credit cards and other traditional payment systems tell the recipient who you are, they also tell the bank or financial institution that you are using a VPN, adding a third party into the private relationship.

Using crypto, a VPN provider can offer to provide VPN to anyone without collecting any personal information.

The VPN provider will still have exposure to all of their customer's IP addresses, but maybe they do stuff to mystify that too. 

 For example, I use mullvad, and I never gave a name, email, nothing. 

 Um... A VPN *always knows what website you visit. 

 Not always, I've see ones that use multiple hops to deanonymise your traffic... like a mini onion network.

https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn/multi-hop/ 

 They're running the servers though. They see the IP address you come in on and which hops you're going through.
All multi-hop does is increase the crowd that you're hiding in. not help you if the provider itself is compromised.

The only way to get around it is to use two VPN providers. I use mullvad on the router level, so all my traffic goes straight to them, and then to an IVPN multihop on top of that.
So they would both have to be working together in order to de-anomise my traffic. 

 Yes, this is what I was talking about. 

 An added layer of protection is using a VPN service not based in a western country - or any country - aligned with the ‘5 Eyes’ intelligence alliance ie Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK and USA eg. it will be much harder for feds to access VPN servers in say Malaysia.