Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I have been doing torrents + VPN for years now and thinking about switching.

Is usenet and debrid safe to use without a VPN in the UK? What about other piracy streaming sites?

From what I understand it's cheaper to use a VPN than have debrid + usenet + private indexers but I am not sure.

I have heard some questionable justifications as to why it's safer such as it being encrypted (torrents can also be encrypted). Are the index sites also safe? I have heard it both ways about this. Including people saying index sites are not encrypted which they normally are.