Never. The article is mostly fear mongering on a slow news day. The
reason why it would be impossible to make a "VPN" illegal is simple;
Internet commerce transactions are done over an encrypted tunnel
(httpS via SSL/TLS), and there is really no simple technical differences
between one kind of secure tunnel and another.

For those that don't know, SSL/TLS based VPN's do exist, and the most
common implementation is OpenVPN. It's based on the same OpenSSL
(library) code that your web browser is (most likely) using.

http://openvpn.net/

The SSL/TLS based VPN's use "only" 128 to 160 bit encryption, and if
your tin foil hat is on tight enough to cut off your circulation, then
this fact makes you nervous. You can run OpenVPN via UDP over a "tun"
interface (OSI Layer 3) or even a "tap" interface (OSI Layer 2), and
compared to many VPN-ish alternatives, it's pretty fast in my tests.

The other common light-weight approach to VPN's is using PPTP (Point to
Point Tunneling Protocol). I have NOT (recently) studied the crypto
employed in PPTP implementations, but I'd guess it's nearly on par with
SSL/TLS. It's been eons since I've messed with PPTP, so I'm going to
keep my (outdated) opinions mostly to myself. The most fair thing to
say is there is (can be) some crypto involved, and it can be pretty fast.

Though I'm currently working on some OpenVPN stuff for firends, I
personally prefer the more (ahem) sophisticated (read: difficult and
complicated) VPN solutions based on SSH, or better, IPSec. They are a
lot more work, but they tend to be more robust and more resistant (when
done properly --and any VPN done wrong is just a false sense of
security). The down-side with SSH based tunnels is there is a greater
performance overhead with TCP based connections, and hence, you get
reduced throughput. IPSec is better, but it's even more difficult to get
right.

For a lot of testing I use Tunnelr.com. They offer both OpenVPN and SSH
(SOCKS) based VPN's for a cheap price.

https://tunnelr.com/

It's kind of sad that privacy is being equated with piracy, but the
"lump it altogether" folks are idiots. There are actually lots of
extremely good (and legal) reasons to use both VPN's and other types of
secure connections... --Every time you buy something from Amazon or
similar, you're most likely using a secure connection.

The original article has a link to:

https://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-ano...

Sadly, the above listing of data retention policies of various VPN
providers is already out of date. For example, iPredator (from the folks
at ThePirateBay) are now logging IP address in accordance with the EU
data retention laws going into effect in Sweden.

https://blog.ipredator.se/2012/03/the-question-of-data-reten...

The iPredator/TPB blog post is intentionally distracting and painfully
vague on details about the logging they've implemented to comply with
the law. (NOTE: I stumbled on the poorly named iPredator service of TPB
because they offer PPTP based VPN's.)

The same may or may not be true of other EU based services listed in the
TorrentFreak link above. See the following for reasonably updated info:

https://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Transposition

If you do any work on Computer Vision (CV) or other types of image/video
analysis (Machine Learning) based on data downloaded from the Internet,
you need to be extremely careful. When you have scripts/programs/spiders
downloading (image/video) data for you, your never know what "kind" of
data is on the other end of any link, and that data may very well be
illegal! --It sucks, but this is the reality everyone lives with. If you
take a step back, you'll realize how normal browsing of the Internet is
really no different than running your own spider to collect data. Every
link you click is a potential violation of some law.