Do y'all use a VPN? If yes, which ones do you recommend?

000000 i thaught wrong! It was not about protonvpn it was about the emailservice.

Byku oh i read that..
my stance is that the authorities knew they /he was using proton then he was negligent.
it is like that student who sent a bomb alert to delay exam using tor from the campus wifi
all they had to do was look to the wifi record who connected to tor
would you say tor is to blame? that they are not as anonymous as they claim to be?

000000 i thaught wrong! It was not about protonvpn it was about the emailservice.

That's one reason why citing sources is generally productive. Thanks for clarifying!

Viewpoint0232 HA! They have been saying "soon" for so many years. Just like proton does with certain features. it will never happen.

Every "privacy" centric company is basically forced (yes, forced, you know what i mean) to do penance by giving up SOME kind of key protection. For Proton it's recovery info and no monero, for Mullvad it's no multihop for android. For Signal for a long time it was blasting your phone number everywhere and still is downloading only from google play, these kinds of things.

Rizzler Yes, they are more trustworthy. Yet still they dont offer key protection. How can I not see them as disingenuous?

anon1 I do not believe that is a useful interpretation especially when Mullvad is innovating with features like DAITA. Feature sets is a valid point of comparison when evaluating products but that requires fairly acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages of the competing products and/or services.

anon1 Multi hop is a feature barely used by most people, so they'll probably only implement it later. Its not something nefarious.

I don't see surfshark mentioned here, is it because it has issues? They claim they support no-log policy

mmobder

Every VPN claims that, it's not always credible

Viewpoint0232 true, they've claimed they've passed respective audit, thought I haven't checked details and decided to ask community for an experienced answer.

Is IVPN legit?

SovereignCopper I don't want to be the tinfoil guy, but this Nick Pestell seems to be a weird dude. He's from the UK (studied there as well according to his LinkedIn), now lives in Berlin, Germany, has his VPN company registered in Gibraltar while it's based in Ukraine. Uhm, what? Also, I can hardly imagine they have complied with 0 government requests. Sounds like Telegrams "0 requests". I'll investigate further, but something doesn't add up for me.

DeletedUser87 Yep, I don't know much about it, but that sounds like something he should explain 😛 Mine was just a quick check from a single source, I have no experience with IVPN other than that I've heard some positive comments here and there from the Windscribe CEO (which is a rare occurrence, if you know him a bit 😛).

I have no issues believing that a VPN has not complied with any government requests: properly done, there's barely any data to acquire about the user in question.

SovereignCopper yeah, the website you took that data from seems to be in line with their (IVPN) own transparency report. I still don't trust that guy (neither do I trust ANY VPN provider for that matter) due to the technically impossible challenge to verify their claims. There is just no guarantee any VPN is following through on their no-log policy. Fwiw I see everyone out there as just another (possibly) govt honeypot.
For my personal setup, I have a WireGuard set up on my home server which gets utilized by the auto-tunnel feature once I leave my home Wi-Fi. It doesn't hide anything from my ISP of course, but it ensures DoH at all times and tracker/ad blocking via AdGuard Home. In this constellation I at least don't have to trust the claims of a third party.

DeletedUser87 Agreed. In all honesty, I have absolutely no idea how I can justify tunneling all my data through a third party, other than that I've been involved in discussing the technical details of the VPN provider I use quite a bit. So there's a lot of communication between us that has (with ups and downs) created trust. It's still debatable as to how much I benefit in terms of privacy by using it (e.g. I'm still logged on in many places while using the VPN), but if I didn't have that "raport" with the creators, I'm sure I wouldn't be able to choose a VPN provider right now.

ryrona neither websites you visit nor peers you connect to can see or log your real unique IP address but will only see a shared one

this is pretty huge benefit when you realize that sites like reddit and facebook and instagram and google etc all keep a record of all of the IP addresses you logged in to with and can cross-reference

rellhom these companies do not rely on IP addresses and haven't for years. They can utilize browser fingerprinting and stuff like WebRTC, among many other techniques, to identify you. Having the IPs is just the icing on the cake for them.