I'm looking to get a VPN for when I travel overseas to access Netflix and some other US based sites. Is there a best VPN for this purpose or are they all about the same?
You only care about one metric and that is speed. In that case PIA. However remoting into your own home network using OpenVPN orWiregaurd will achieve what you ask and is relatively easy to set up for free. My only concern about PIA is there were recently bought up by a company who made money off of selling user data in the past. They claimed they have reformed. But I'm sure with enough gov't money thrown at them, they might change their mind. (ATT and Verizon make significant money to track specific customers from gov't warrants. This seems like a conflict of interest to me like red light cameras.)
If you care about being hidden from illegal activities, NONE of them. There's enough hacks out there, that if you hit a gov't or hacker honeypot, your VPN will not protect your identity. If they want you bad enough they will get ya. Unless you can control the data and source code on both ends, you are subject to backdoors and hack attacks.
For example, b rowsers are subject to something called digital finger printing Even if you are in private mode, the characteristics of javascript calls do not change. If you run a browser on a VPN, you get a finger print. You then run the same browser off the VPN, you still have the same finger print. This can be analyzed through traffic. And once the fingerprint matches, your non protected IP will be revealed. And this isn't even a coding flaw. It's a perfectly valid use of functions used to help render pages correctly. There are other methods too which require zero hacks. There's a very popular browser that has a cookie flaw in private surfing mode that allows the website to determine you are in private mode, then create a cookie that persist after private browsing has ended. The list of flaws and hacks for various programs goes on and on and on.