[zorrophreak]

Correct, they are absolute garbage for anonymity. Sure they can keep a simple site from knowing who you are but most of them, whether they say they do or not do keep logs. Its good as long as you don't do anything to make you a prime target. There are other ways such as hosting your own on a decentralized server and layer it a bit, but if anonymity is your thing, there are better methods.

As for security, they're great unless of course they neglect to use a secure protocol and there are VPNs that have no security and all data can be seen by them which could be far worse than your local coffee shop entrepreneur getting your data. However if everything is good, its great for security and for illegal downloading, and for hiding usage of services like TOR.

That is very true. There are indeed those odd VPNs which use shitty encryption, or even no encryption at all. I use a free VPN to connect to TOR, which sounds dumb because it is a free VPN, but I just simply want to hide the fact that I'm using TOR network from my ISP.

So long as you're just hiding TOR or BitTorrent, you should be fine with anything as long as there is encryption of some sort and the company isn't like a front for a copyright troll. All you really need. However its nice to have something that you can keep doing minimal stuff should your connection to TOR network drop.