dislike ≠ hate. I don’t even mention China. Why do you insist on the extreme? It’s pretty clear that the UK is hostile toward anonymity, privacy and VPNs if you read the news recently. It’s true that the UK is not as extreme as China here. That’s true. And you’re right, we’re arguing over the semantics.
Stop putting words in my mouth! All I want to say is that are good reasons why people want anonymity in this situation and I gave you two examples. That’s it. I’m not saying that they should not public their name or that they have bad intentions or whatever.
But you saying this reminds me of the same logic of the statements people say and believe that goes something along the lines of “we don’t have privacy anymore anyway, why should I care about privacy products” or “there is no privacy online and the companies already have all my data, what’s the point of the privacy tools and apps anyway”
Do you see the connection? I think you’re engaging in whataboutism and this derails the conversation from the entity in question here and now. We can discuss the arbitrary lines we draw when we decide to use or not use a particular product simply based on a few facts that does raise eyebrows later/elsewhere. That’s taking a stance on a philosophical level and differences you may have with the people that may be or have funded a particular project.
Same logic can be extended and extrapolated to include the bad bad business practices of all of big tech. And you can take a stance on choosing not to use their products whatsoever. This would effectively mean you not being on the internet because much of the internet infrastructure also runs on the services of the same big tech companies we may despise.
No. Am I engaging in whataboutism or are you dodging my question?
I think this question has been answered:
In other words, “your line” is yours to draw.
What? My question is not that hard to answer. There are many reasonable answers to my question that are grounded in reality. I will only give you three examples, there are many more:
You can say “I trust DuckDuckGo because many of the “experts” said that it can be trusted despite being VC-funded.”
Or you can say “I trust DuckDuckGo because I use the wait-and-see approach and it didn’t do any “concerning activities” during its lifetime according to my research despite being VC-funded.”
Or you can just straight-up say “I don’t trust DuckDuckGo because it was VC-funded.”
See! It’s that easy! You don’t have to be a philosopher to answer my question.
Whatever it is, you can use your answer when dealing with any other company like Obscura and Brave and whatever.
Of course, you can also say “I trust DuckDuckGo and I don’t know it was VC-funded.” It’s a valid answer, just not particularly helpful in this situation.
Also, how can you go from “how can I, as a privacy-conscious person, trust a VC-funded company?” to “privacy is dead because big corpos already have all the data” that fast? I’m impressed.
When a specific topic gets generalized to death
But you saying this reminds me of the same logic of the statements people say and believe that goes something along the lines of “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” and “big, evil corpos infiltrate into every fiber of society, so why should I care about ethical consumption?”
This isn’t the excuse you think it is, Carl (: I encourage you to be more transparent, as the multi-party protocol you’ve worked so hard to implemented speaks for its guarantees anyway!
I know for a fact that Carl’s been online here after he posted this and after I commented on the same because he commented on other things but not this one. To give them another benefit of the doubt, I am hoping a press release of sorts is in works for such disclosures but I can only speculate so much in good faith.
I sincerely hope he gets back soon as I don’t want them to leave a bad taste in my mouth about Obscura.
A less than stellar response (to say the least) to a legitimate and a reasonable set of questions we had about your funding and people behind it and you still do not see the importance of transparency here.
I am disappointed. You could have done better. But now its on the record.
–
@jonah please do keep this in mind when evaluating Obscura for an official PG recommendation. Thank you.
Yeah, we didn’t ask you about this though. We asked about something else. The obvious ignorance of our concerns and questions is uncool and shows the lack of importance you’re showing for your potential new customers especially during a time when you’re trying to gain more users. I am upset, to be honest.
I don’t believe your response is in line with my questions and concerns so I don’t consider this a valid answer.
Like others have said, lack of transparency and lack of being proactively interested in what I and others consider an important disclosure is more honest and telling than what your open source product can be.
I wish you do better. But for now, I’m going to have to discount your product and efforts for what you’re trying to do. The how matters too. I thought you knew this.
While I don’t love the recent response by @obscuracarl I don’t think it warrants completely disregarding Obscura VPN or their potential recommendation.
I think overall @obscuracarl has been a really valuable contributor to this forum and I believe, as of now, the good far outweighs the bad with this project.
It should definitely raise red flags even if the product itself may be good. I guess it depends on if your evaluation of something is holistic or not (and only to the product itself and what it is about and not about the company/people behind it at all).
To me it is highly contradictory for what this product is and how they are choosing to not respond with transparency. I mean, the irony writes itself here.
Like you said it all depends on the individuals evaluation.
My experience is that behind any project are people. People say things I might disagree with all the time. If I allow one individual remark (that’s not overtly racists, sexists, or homophobic etc) outsized importance, I would of dropped wonderful projects like Proton and GOS years ago.
I think it is a pretty big assumption to think you could understand the underlying beliefs and principles of a person based on one or two comments you disagree with. If I am understanding your comment correctly.
You’re misunderstanding. I meant how you or each person may value and prioritize is how they will evaluate the product differently, even when its against objective metrics.
Mostly because, by having the keys to the exit account, the guarantees of 2-hop multi-party architectures like Private Relay rely on “trust me bro” instead.
The 1st hop only sees your connecting IP, but can’t decrypt your traffic. It forwards the still-encrypted traffic to the 2nd hop …
The 2nd (exit) hop connects you to the internet, but never sees your personal info or IP address since it only knows that the connection is coming from the 1st hop.
It isn’t in a 3 hop architecture like Tor’s. Otherwise, the guarantees must come from the control plane and the client (both run by entry in Obscura’s multi-party), and these guarantees can be cryptographically backed (like with Privacy Pass Rate-limit Tokens in the Private Relay design) or not (and so, imo, a 2 hop multi-party VPN that does not / cannot enroll with exit anonymously is no different than a multi-hop VPN like Proton or Mullvad, which control both entry and exit).