Currently using IVPN, but considering switching and I want to see what this subreddit community thinks.
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proton, supports split tunneling, based in europe and they have a strict no-logs policy
So now proton is ok and Mullvad is bad? I thought proton was ostracized for the same reasons?
proton had one incident sponsoring a far-right influencer, which was probably caused by a rogue employee. they’ve also done some cringe praising of the republican party because they’re apparently against big tech abuses (lol)
that’s about it really. bad but not the worst thing in the world since they say that sponsorship was a mistake and it wont happen again. the political statements are cringe but it was just about free market blah blah so i personally don’t care since there isn’t really a better option
mullvad’s ceo on the other hand directly donated 5 million sek to örebropartiet, a fascist party in sweden. that’s very bad
Disclaimer: Don’t take my response; this post, or other replies seriously.
Everyone has their own feelings. The truth is we probably don’t code, understand, and can actually look at the technologies behind vpns. We are just users. That’s not a bad thing at all (but) here’s the truth.
Our opinions on privacy tools has changed. First proton was weird and mullvad good, now its mullvad is bad and proton is good. That’s not consistent and we just have to be honest because there’s many people with different beliefs and experiences privacy recommendations will never be consistent.
Let’s actually crack open both controversies. Protons was a company the other an individual. The result to the public the same now each company can’t be trusted. Vpns are a trust me bro industry and if you can’t trust them for whatever reason then just do not use those vpns.
The answer is simple hard to swallow and honestly straight forward. Stop using commercial VPN providers and start using proxies or tor. Vpns and their tunnels where originally developed for private server access not a general tool for app and internet browsing. They’re pretty good since the tunnel itself can be hidden or obscured. However the end result is a trust within a company.
So stop trusting people and opinions even mine.
my concern is about avoiding big tech collecting my data, so a vpn with a strict no-logs policy is good enough for me.
tor and proxies are just too much of a pain in the ass and not necessary for my use case, so i’m sticking with proton
Same here
AirVPN with privacy focus and port forwarding
Airvpn actually looks really good even though I’ve never heard of them. Cheap, has all the features I need and they have existed for a long time.
There are literally dozens of us!!!
In all seriousness tho, I like the fact that Eddie supports amnezia wireguard.
Heck yeah! I’ve been using them for about a year now. I’m happily going to pay for another year.
Mullvad but the founder is a fascist so ill change that after my time runs out
I’m not defending Mullvad, but this does lack more context.
What context? Only thing I can think of it was a private donation rather than made by mullvad itself
It was the co-founder, Daniel, that made the donation, the other founder, Fredrik, “did not like that he made this donation”.
Edit: I’ll include a link to Mullvad’s official response to the controversy since it’s relevant.
Fair enough
Also context that the 5 million kronor (around €450,000) was roughly 72% of everything the party took in during 2025, and it’s also the largest private donation made to any Swedish political party that year.
Puts it into perspective.
First link I found as I’m lazy (but not lazy enough to not cite) other Lemmy comments/sites will agree.
How many times does it have to be ‘discussed’ though?
lemmy has a search function, 99% of people here already know what happened with mullvad.
Lemmy does have a search function, but is it good?
https://lemmy.zip/search?q=mullvad&type=All&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false
Threads 5 and 6 are the fairly obvious relevant ones when I searched
I’m not necessarily looking for a new discussion, I just thought it was important to clarify since it reads differently when you have more context.
I doubt those that are unaware would look much deeper into it.
it reads differently when you have more context
In what way?
As I mentioned in my other comment, there are two founders, one of which does not like the action of the other.
Sure? He self-define anarchist
Elon musk says hes an anarchist but he did a sieg heil in front of millions watching
Despots and the elite always like to brand themselves as democratic, for the people, or whatever. Its the usual propaganda. Can’t have the peasants seeing them for what they really are.
Looks like a social networks hate campaign to me.
I switched from Mullvad to IVPN after the Mullvad troubles. IVPN seems good to so far, does everything I need and hasn’t been proven untrustworthy/politically dodgy yet.
Mullvad troubles
what troubles?
One of the founders bankrolled a far right party, allowing them to field candidates and they say that “Sweden is for the swedes” and want to forcibly deport anyone who is not. Kinda like that small mustache guy in the 40s in Germany.
https://korben.info/en/mullvad-cofounder-funding-far-right.html
I need to bookmark my comment from a while back as an explainer lol
AirVPN. I switched from proton a while ago because it was a pain to do port forwarding. AirVPN lets me have multiple ports forwarding with ease. And they take xmr as payment!
What was a part of it was a pain, exactly? I use port forwarding and have no issues.
There wasn’t a clear/easy way to do it on a headless server. Maybe they’ve improved the service since
Don’t know how you do it but I just downloaded the config file from Proton and deploy stacks of the app I want to use port forwarding on + gluetun (which uses the conf file I mentioned). I don’t really see why a server being headless would complicate the process.
Wondering why you are considering leaving ivpn?
They appear to be 1 of only 2 trustworthy vpns now that mullvad left the building
airvpn being the other
What’s wrong with proton?
Been there, left that, they have no redeeming qualities.
what about Mullvad?
Co-founder donated to a fringe party supporting remigration
oh ok, right.
The issue is I don’t care about the founders political ideology (Unless he is some Sieg Hieling Nazi and not just some stupid alt-right millionaire)
if the political orientation of the cofounder is important (and I personally believe that it can be) than equally, if not more, important is the jurisdiction of the services. I’d avoid both UK and Switzerland for a VPN.
If I may ask, why avoid Switzerland? Is there some shady stuff they’ve been doing recently?
no, I just think the misconception that Switzerland is some kind of privacy paradise is very common and any possible malicious entity, from corporations to governments, can too easily take advantage of this.
Huh, that makes sense… Is that why Proton has been using it as a flex so much?
definitely, but to be fair the same goes for most similar swiss companies that I know.
Proton, because its fast and reliable in my experience so i never felt the need to switch, plus i agree with their policies.
Mullvad for stuff that matters. Which is 24/7 on all devices.
Airvpn for piracy and only for piracy.
Ivpn, windscribe, proton or whoever else isn’t obviously an idf cutout and running a deal for scraping and bypassing geoblocks.
If I’m at home:
Device > WireGuard Tunnel > ProtonVPN Endpoint
If I’m disconnected from my home network:
Device > WireGuard Tunnel > Home Network > WireGuard Tunnel > ProtonVPN Endpoint
Essentially created my own multi-hop network, works like a charm.
Nice, was thinking about doing this as well. Do you switch manually between apps on your device? Or do you use a wireguard app with multiple profiles?
I just today started using the new Tor VPN app. I have been using InviZible from F-Droid in SOCKS proxy mode for almost 2 years now, but not all apps support directing their network traffic through a SOX proxy. And so, some apps I was not able to do over Tor. I think the day will come where we as free people have to abandon the clear net entirely and do everything over Tor and I2P. The clearnet is going to become nothing except for ID upload verification screens.
Ivpn: canary, audited, anonymous accounts purchasable with crypto or cash, no performance issues, no logs (allegedly), open source protocols and clients.
I really like their blatant honesty in “Do you really need a VPN?”
Fundamentally, the only use case of a VPN is if you trust them with your traffic more than your ISP. Since I’ve had multiple ISPs that serve up adds instead of 404s and will threaten you for using p2p protocols it’s easy to trust a VPN more. As best I can tell Ivpn is just a couple of security peeps running a VPN service cause they can–could they be corrupted or a honey pot? Yeah, but the anonymous accounts help mitigate that risk, and the reality is that even an anonymous account can be tied back to your IP. So don’t do anything illegal illegal on just a VPN and it’ll prolly be fine.
And they’re not advertised through everyone with a platform.
Considering what my ISP is I think I’d trust any vpn with a FOSS client over them…
Isn’t IVPN based in Gibraltar? 🤷♂️
It is. Which I suppose is a consideration, but being an autonomous territory they don’t have retention legislation yet. As the EU, and GB along with them (and to be honest, the rest of the developed world) tends toward mandating logs and shit that arithmetic may change. They aren’t a part of a surveillance sharing network today, and since I’m personally only using a VPN for p2p stuff this isn’t really a consideration for me personally.
Kinda surprised no one recommending Nym.
Yet an other swiss based facsist company with a touch of crypto bro. No thanks.
Source? Last I knew the founder is anti-fascist and regularly speaks out against things like tech oligarchy. Nothing of what I’ve heard him say or talk about has given me any feeling otherwise.
Crypto Bro -> https://cointelegraph.com/opinion/web3-has-a-metadata-problem , https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/why-mixnets-are-needed-to-make-bitcoin-private
Also they love using LLM trained on our works (devs) : https://nym.com/blog/bug-bounty-ai-age
About the fascism I understand that few people here (proportionally) seems to not be educated on the topic (I see to many pedolandians or canadians in here maybe) : fascism is not being a bad guys wanting to control everyone, lots of monarchs were that way, this is not fascism. Fascism is the bourgeoisie (the social class owning the properties, even more so the means of productions) taking power over society, the more power they grab the deeper you’re in fascism. That’s why many western people do not understand they live in fascist societies while they can agree that money is the real power, not the decrepit old white man put in front (thus they don’t understand fascism, and I think this is on purpose, from schools to media).
So a senior research scientist at MIT (CEO) and a founder of Swiss crypto brokerage and financial services firm (COO) decided to create a company in… wait for it… Switzerland! Famous country know for it fight against the aggression of the bourgeoisie for the last century and its strong stance against today’s genocides. Definitely not known for being the Nazi’s gold vault and all sorts of awful money laundering. If you understand that fascism come from the people who owns the money what do you think about private banks? Swiss is fascists’ paradise and it always have been.
I can close my eyes on Swedish people establishing in Sweden, or anyone in his European country, even if the actual government is far-right there or not. But this is not really the case here, it’s more like the Y-combinator guys establishing in Delaware or… Cayman Islands! This is 101 people only seeking money at the expense of everyone else. Hence my point of view this is already quiet deep in fascism, even if there are smart enough not to open their mouth about Palestine and keeping themselves into crypto-broing and “privacy” (I could totally see them loving anarcho-capitalism).
Also bonus : what social media do they choose? OH NO! Linkedin and Twitter, I wouldn’t have guessed. If you want maximum cringe check the avatar -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-roussel-01993143/
Fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palingenetic_ultranationalism this is Roger Griffin’s influential minimalist definition of fascism, and it’s probably the most succinct formulation available in the comparative fascism literature.
“Fascism is bourgeoisie taking power” is very reductive as a definition, and it doesn’t hold up to scholarly work on the issue.
Never actually used them, but this is my note about them in my vpn spreadsheet
‘Pricey if doing per month, not if doing for year. Lack of transparency, shit website. Dodgy feel.’
You can add “mixnet often not the right choice and available for free through tor if needed.”
Even compared to companies owned by former idf cybersec unit members nym feels the most like a honeypot. Historically speaking that means it’s probably a bunch of true believers being manipulated by a handler working fifteen minutes a day on them.
I still use PIA, but only for a couple of things running in containers. I use wireguard as my private vpn for my own services
Do you have any thoughts on the Kape buyout? https://usernotices.com/finance-and-business/advertising/who-is-the-new-owner-of-pia
Because of who Kape is, and their ties to Israeli military, I personally consider them a threat actor instead of a valid VPN choice for my needs.
https://blog.boycat.io/posts/expressvpn-israeli-ownership-1b-privacy-risk
My plan is to jump ship when my plan expires in a couple of months. I only have indexers going though it these days as 99% of my “data sourcing” is done via Usenet over SSL and the VPN isn’t technically required in that case.
I use them as well, simply because they had a screaming deal for 3 years of service, it seems plenty fast and stable, and my threat model is pretty much just keeping my torrenting private.
Proton currently but probably switching to Windscribe soon due to increasingly invasive advertising.
increasingly invasive advertising.
Curious about this. Like you’re using their apps and they have ads or something?
As in, I have a proton unlimited subscription and keep getting in-app advertisements for proton Duo as if I’m a free user or something?
Weird. I haven’t seen any of that since becoming paid…
I mostly see it in pass and mail
Yes, they are putting more and more upsell ads into their products. Recently I opened Proton Pass and there was an add taking up the entire little extension bubble.
Yes, they are ads about the ongoing deals and promos. It seems like you get those ads once a season or so. These aren’t the intrusive personalized ads like from Google, mind you. They are “local” product ads to increase sales and support for Proton products. They can be annoying, but also they’re not permanent.
I mean, windscribe made that one ad w/ hitler in it…
I don’t, I use DNS over HTTPS. That’s far more fitting for my threat model right now.
Hi, can you explain why/what the benefits are for that? I’ve read a little about DNS over HTTPs but I guess just don’t get it .
DNS over HTTPS encrypts your DNS queries, which means at most your ISP can see what sites you visit and not what you’re doing on those sites.
Depending on the infrastructure used by the site, your ISP might also not even know what site you’re visiting.
