Hello, I carefully read That One’s Privacy Guy’s guide, and I looked at his site in depth. Despite having some ideas, I’m still quite skeptical about the method with which you should trust a vpn provider but above all there are dozens of valid choices, I would like to know your ideas / choices to improve my selection.
So I would like to try to establish a sort of “survey” (or even general opinions) focused only on which vpn you have chosen to improve privacy:
vpn chosen/would choose specifically for privacy
reasons for the choice (main purpose, again, only privacy)
I know there are so many other things to consider if you want to improve online privacy (imho first of all compartmentalization), but I would like to focus only on the reasons for choosing a specific vpn; so as to know the most used vpn by you for this purpose.
You sign up with an auto-generated account number, no email required.
They encourage anonymous payment methods, even allowing you to send them envelopes of cash.
They have zero trackers on their website (it never ceases to amaze me how many VPN providers claim to care about your privacy while using trackers on their websites).
Their client app is open source, has recently been independently audited, and is under active development.
Great connection speeds.
Excellent privacy policy that spells out precisely what information they store and what they don’t.
The only thing to be aware of is that they’re based in Sweden, which is a part of the fourteen eyes. However, as I understand it, there are currently no laws in place that could force them to spy on their users – and they have stated that they’re willing to shut down and move jurisdictions if the law ever changed such that this was the case.
I chose to try ProtonVPN after their partnership with Mozilla foundation that has been announced this week, how someone sceptical about free VPNs but at same really happy with ProtonMail from time ago, I guess that I can recommend their VPN also. It’s very stable and has good speed for my needs inclusive in the free edition, the amazing function of ”Secure Core”, if you pay is a plus.
I’m not affiliated or liked in anyway to ProtonVPN.
I think that Privacy Guy has a pretty neat guide, from which you can make a decision. Sadly but it doesn’t include the VPN I use, I don’t know why, maybe because it is really new. I use Surfshark VPN, it appeared in the VPN market half a year ago. I bought it at the beginning and I can see how fast it is growing. I found it secure and one that doesn’t collect logs, doesn’t leak, uses advanced security protocols and never had I encountered problems with ISP for torrenting. Main purpose why I choose it, it’s because I’m low at money so I bought one account with my friends and share the cost. Surfshark lets me connect unlimited number of devices. Of course it has many more neat features like built-in ad blocker, kill switch, split tunnelling. I know that not many people know this VPN, which is actually pretty cool, because there are not many users, which results in fast speeds, their servers are not crowded like in the big one VPNs.
I also used NordVPN and ExpressVPN in the past and could say good things about it, but I think you can get all the information about them in That One privacy site. I hoped this helped you in some way. Good luck choosing.
For your ultimate peace of mind, you can rent VPS in various places around the world and host your own VPN through them. But since it might cause a huge dent in your pocket, you can try subscribing to two or more best VPNs suggested by that one privacy guy and switch/alternate your connection every few hours.
But if you log in to face book . com and post your selfies in it then there is no use of using a VPN to begin with. But ofc there are other reasons to use a VPN, like for accessing certain servers etc.
In general, you should not trust any centralized VPNs. There is an inherent weakness in funneling all of your data through one central entity. Specifically, you have to trust their claims that they will not mishandle/log/sell your data in any way, and there’s absolutely no way to verify those claims. Even for providers that are trustworthy today, nothing stops a future acquirer from immediately changing those policies upon acquisition. This goes for both free and paid centralized VPNs.
Use a decentralized VPN (like TOR) if you want to maximize your privacy.
Mullvad also supports WireGuard. Almost no speed loss. Using it straight out of my router and it works like a charm. I’ve tried and looked into many different VPNs and mullvad is my personal number one. Using it for over one year now.
As somebody using ProtonVPN (PVPN) for around a year (and Protonmail for longer) I think it’s one of the better choices in regards to privacy and security. For Linux use it’s nice that they have a command-line-based client if you can call it that but others support Linux even better. I believe there’s been some issues with DNS leaks on Linux - and in general - but think that’s been resolved.
Performance is decent, but the performance/price isn’t particularly good AFAIK. No support for Wireguard yet, and it doesn’t sound like it’s coming, at least not any time soon.
It’s nice that PVPN actually engage a bit with the community over on /r/ProtonVPN.
My reasons for picking PVPN was mostly that I already had a good impression from Protonmail and their commitment to privacy, and privacytools.io’s recommendation (a significant factor being that PVPN is based in a non 14-eyes country with strong privacy regulation).
From That One’s Privacy Guy’s guide website, protonvpn logs dns, has ethics contradictory logging policies and it’s not really out of 14 eyes (cooperative) … imho (never tested) I’d try mullvad…
This. Also, can’t wait for the iPhone app to be properly rolled out for all users (including Basic users). I like everything about ProtonMail/VPN - their dedication to privacy and security, their background at CERN, and more recently their partnership with another of my favourites - Firefox.
I was in the same boat, using a free account of Windscribe for P2P downloads. Its free option was more than enough for my casual needs of P2P; after Netflix in my life is very strange that I need to download something.
Without leave from the free accounts area, I was using the app of TunnelBear in my smartphone that gives me 1’5 gigabytes that was more than enough for connecting to free public WiFi in public spaces (living in the edge!) like malls, restaurants or other spaces underground outside the range of my cellular 4G connection.
Now with Proton I guess that I’m served in much better way.
This is true in a technical sense, but not when evaluating alternatives. TOR, VPN, proxy, they’re all used for the same reason in the context of this question.
Hey CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they’re all essentially “remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word”.