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Free vpn?
- Thread starter Jet Labs
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Protonvpn is pretty good. The free version is a bit slow, but they are legit according to what I have gathered.
Do not EVER use a free VPN. Protonvpn might be the most promising, but just don't. If you get NordVPN a 2 year plan will have you paying less than 4 bucks per month. A 1 year plan will have you paying $5 per month. If you can't afford 4 bucks per month for your anonymity and safety in life, then you're fucking up. Seriously, it is NOT worth it. Many free VPNs have been caught keeping logs despite them claiming not to. But the fact is, you aren't paying them, they have no allegiance to you or any of their customers! Those logs could be incriminating and lead to you going to fucking prison. Pay the damn $4 and rest easy knowing your door won't be kicked down by federal agents because you bought some fucking testosterone over the internet.
Are there ANY examples of protonvpn co-operating with authorities and an end user being busted because of it? If you are purchasing personal amounts of gear, I have a hard time believing they would waste their time doing so.
Now, I will say that it's cheap enough to pay $4-5 a month, but what proof do you have that paying for protonvpn vs free would get you treated differently or more protection?
Has proton ever co-operated with authorities and actually had any data to turn over to them? Honestly curious about this.
I highly doubt the RCMP are going to bust my door down for personal use stuff and even if they did a judge here would never convict, but thanks for the advice
Approximately 1900 times through 2019.
Transparency report | Proton
Proton's transparency report with aggregate statistics of legal orders from the Swiss authorities, covering Proton Mail, Proton Drive, and Proton Calendar.
protonmail.com
View: https://twitter.com/ProtonMail/status/1175458092160565259?s=20
Still waiting to see how many court-approved requests for which Protonmail turned over data in 2020. It could be a lot given the ever increasing popularity of the service.
It went from 23 in 2017 --> 336 in 2018 --> 1,484 in 2019 --> ????? in 2020.
It went from 23 in 2017 --> 336 in 2018 --> 1,484 in 2019 --> ????? in 2020.
My whole point is about risk. The risk is small, but the impact is potentially life ruining. A good paid VPN is FOUR DOLLARS per month. Personally I'd rather be safe than sorry, you never know what the fuck law enforcement is going to do. They may very well decide to randomly bust whatever users they can. They might even try to pin you for doing something you're not doing.I highly doubt the RCMP are going to bust my door down for personal use stuff and even if they did a judge here would never convict, but thanks for the advice
Even if the judge won't convict, consider the sheer amount of psychological stress the situation would cause and then also the amount of money you'd have to shell out just to retain a lawyer and get them to show up to the case, even if it ends up being dismissed. Fuck that shit.
Many people concealed carry. The statistical likelihood of anything happening is insanely low, but people still do it because they'd rather be safe than sorry. Same concept. Risk/reward. I will gladly pay a little bit of money to protect myself from nosy assholes who are trying to ruin the lives of people simply because they use a drug.
And privacy as a matter of principle is a good reason as well. Are we really ok about being surveilled with a permanent record by big corporations or government even if we are "doing nothing wrong" or "won't go to jail"?
From a bit of reading, paid accounts, at least through proton, don't receive any extra safety when it comes to probing governments.
They certainly do cooperate more than I ever knew, but it still doesn't amount to much actual data being handed over as they still don't have access to our inboxes.
Still disturbing nonetheless and I will be upgrading to @MFAAS's recommendation upon doing a little research.
And if you are worried about U.S. officials obtaining your info, a closer look at the numbers reveals only 44 foreign requests from "Americas" were approved by Swiss courts in 3 years. It's possible that Swiss authorities are obtaining data on behalf of U.S. authorities.
ExpressVPN also seems to be a very solid choice. I posted in the "recommend a good VPN thread" a few weeks ago
muscletrain
Member
NordVPN/ExpressVPN/PIA are all horrible choices if you are talking about privacy focused VPNs. Proton actually publishes open source proof that they do not carry logs and there are no backdoors in their software suites. You're recommending basically a mainstream VPN that are totally fine for torrenting/file sharing but if you are privacy/security focus my recommendations would be something like ProtonVPN or Mullvad VPN.
I disagree. Please provide some kind of sources or additional information to back this up. I also recommend you see my post from this thread right here on VPN recommendations. I did quite a bit of research to create that post which is why I trust my opinion more than yours at this point. You just said "don't use these, use these instead", the provided nothing to back your points up. I work in IT Security and have for a decade and I like to think I am pretty well versed in these topics.
In the end, we are talking about two separate things here: privacy and anonymity. Yes, they go hand in hand and we usually want both, but they are separate things.
Privacy is having some level of secrecy around your actions and activities so that you can keep them to yourself or to a group of authorized individuals of your choosing. For example, you might have a friend who knows your meso handle. Your wife/gf might know what you buy online or what kind of porn you watch, but you obviously don't want your ISP or your grandmother or the government to know.
Anonymity is when you don't really care who sees you doing something, you just want them to not know that it is you.
Example: using a VPN to watch porn. What is it? Privacy. Why? Because obviously the porn site will have logs of your visit, ISPs will see traffic going to the site, the content creator may get revenue based off ads and pages you visit.
Example 2: Going to a public internet place with a "beater laptop" while wearing a disguise that shields your identity from cameras and onlookers, then using TOR to access a darknet market. You have no privacy at all, people are looking at you, the ISPs can see what you're doing. You do have anonymity though.
Example 3: using a VPN + TOR + a "beater laptop" or "privacy VM" (the former being better than the latter) from a public network while wearing clothes that cover your skin, lifted shoes to make you taller, and a mask like Johnny Knoxville wears to make you look 70 to buy drugs online. You are anonymous. There is no way this can be traced back to you. This laptop is an anonymous laptop, it isn't registered to you, you have never used it to log into ANYTHING personal like Gmail or Facebook or anything like that. The accounts you use for the transaction and crypto and whatnot have never been used from your personal computer or phone or anywhere that could possibly link them to you. This is anonymity and privacy both and it usually what we want to protect ourselves.
Using a VPN alone will NEVER make you anonymous. You must take additional steps to ensure anonymity as much as possible. You can see my gigantic post about privacy and anonymity here.
Now, it does look like Mullvad had an audit performed to verify they don't keep logs. So that would likely put them on par with that of NordVPN as far as the credibility backing up their no-log claims. I see absolutely ZERO reason for you to claim they are better than NordVPN though.
They literally both have the same claims, similar policies, and the same third-party audit. However, NordVPNs audit was done by PwC - one of the top 4 audit firms in the world. Mullvad's audit was done by Cure53, which I have never heard of and are a small audit and penn test firm based out of Denmark. Not saying that Cure53 doesn't do good work, but the name PwC does carry some weight in the audit and security community. I have personally worked with them on IT audits before as well as consulting engagements and they do very good work and are very knowledgeable, in my experience.
One thing that is nice about NordVPN is that they operate out of Panama, thus are outside of both the EU and US jurisdiction and is not required to collect your personal data and information. Mullvad is from Sweden and thus there are different regulations that require them to keep more information about customers--although it still seems that they do not keep logs.
Anyway that's all I have for now. The post I mentioned above where I recommend various VPNs and provide detailed explanations as to why still stands.
This.
Free VPNs are just not worth it as they have limitations that annoy and these WILL keep logs (and gladly hand them over to LE upon request) so best to go with a paid VPN...Nord and ProtonVPN (paid version) are good.
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