VPNs have many uses, but I think it is overstated how much they provide in privacy. They can hide your public IP address, but your VPN provider still knows it (and you have to trust them that they won't keep all the information on you). And you can still be identified by your browser fingerprint which a VPN doesn't do anything about. Their encryption doesn't add much either, since most traffic on the web is already encrypted via TLS or SSL (when you use https sites).

They are however useful to access content that isn't available in all regions of the world, when all you need is to hide your ip (e.g. when pirating (i imagine most governments won't go through the effort to try figure out who is behind the vpn, but I'm not sure)), to allow you to access an institution's intranet from home, to allow playing LAN games with your friends when both of you are on different networks and behind a NAT, or in any other situation when you need to use the internet with another IP or need to route traffic to another network.