In terms of privacy, doesn't it kind of let the cat out of the bag if you host your own VPN server? It's not your home address, but it's still just as much an address associated with you, isn't it?
Indeed it doesn't provide anonymity against the sites you visit - quite the opposite, it makes it even easier to correlate your browsing regardless of device/location.
But many (the undersigned for example) use VPNs for many other purposes:
Unencrypted WiFi (airport, hotel, etc)
Secure connectivity but provided by someone you aren't willing to trust (your employer?)
Fooling Geo-IP based restrictions (hello Netflix/BBC)
Not having your VoIP traffic mangled by a shitty carrier who's trying to extort protection money from you in the form of some "VoIP-optimized" expensive plan
It's less private for some forms of traffic, but for me, my main goal is to avoid ISP tracking and provide encryption on potentially malicious networks, which it works well enough for.
I think you misunderstand the reason for using a VPN. Privacy is not the same as anonymity.
Let me try to explain. You use a VPN to protect your connection from MiM attacks, for example if you connect to a public wifi-hotspot, or even when you are connected from home. It also gives you some privacy, because nobody can sniff your traffic, but it does not give you anonymity, well it can, but you'll not be able to verify that it does.
Sure, you hide from your ISP, but you can't verify that your VPN-provider is more trustworthy than your ISP. They might actually log everything and send it on to a third party and you'll never know. Hell, they might even be funded by the NSA...
Use Tor if you want anonymity, even though that's not 100 % sure either.
It just shifts your traffic egress location to a cloud provider, but this is valuable because all of the last mile Internet providers in the US colluded with the government to get permission to use your internet traffic to sell ads, so if you care about privacy, and not allowing your ISP to inspect your traffic, it's a huge benefit.
AWS will make no secondary use of customer data. The ISPs have told us they will, and the FCC gave them permission to do so. Which one will you trust? I know I would trust AWS any day over the ISPs...
