It’s not necessarily about trusting, but that would increase your attack surface of adding another entity to not mess up with. Without a threat model in mind, it’s only speculative.
Gift Cards are probably a more accessible option for creating an anonymous Mullvad account if you’re unfamiliar with Monero. You can easily buy them with cash in person.
Obviously not but if you are connected from your home IP anyways it doesn’t matter as much. You still made it out to be overly cumbersome to pay for Mullvad anonymously. You can buy a gift card from Amazon and they won’t be able to tie it back to your Mullvad account since they don’t know the gift code.
I’m not saying one or the other is better or worse. I am just saying that Mullvad offers Gift cards which Proton doesn’t.
You can’t practically hide the fact that you are using Mullvad anyways, even if you pay for it anonymously. You can’t threat model for anonymity using a tool which fundamentally isn’t designed for such a use case.
I don’t think so. You can also use an anonymous free email account (no payment method) but it doesn’t do you much good if you access the email from home or make the email address your government name.
Idk man honestly I’m pretty confused. Even when payments are made anonymously / their is no payment, VPNs aren’t an anonymity tool. Tor exists for anonymity and the fact that you haven’t paid for the VPN with using a traceable method won’t protect you from state surveillance.
Are anonymous accounts really superior to an account purchased anonymously? Genuine question.
Only on the Play store version btw. If you are talking about “Guest mode”.
Guys, it would be great if we stopped arguing between two good products. They each have their own pros and cons, and it really depends on your threat models and what you need from a VPN.
6 Likes
This is cutting teeth, but it’s a different chance to mess up with a different entity. Maybe you didn’t have TOR properly running when creating the throwaway, or compromise yourself associated with the e-mail by some other means. My opinion is the less entities one needs to interact, the easier the OpSec is. Again, all speculative without a threat model, and ymmv.
1 Like
I agree, we talking about very specific use cases with threat models. The original topic is if there are known issues will Mullvad. The answer to that generic question is a generic answer: the tech of Mullvad is solid and better than most other providers. Only “issue” is less servers and maybe not as good of ability to stream movies and television without the service spotting your VPN, and blocking it (if you’re already logged in and paying, kinda pointless anyway from a privacy standpoint).
Why? You literally defeated the purpose of your own words by saying “they each have their own pros and cons”. That is exactly why people are arguing about it. Its a really helpful and healthy thing to do.
Probably not. The outcome is the same.
The Guest Mode is credential-less, yes.
I’ve looked at the implementation, reimplemented their APIs, ran it as standalone, and it actually worked across platforms. Now, I use it everyday. So, the limitation (Play Store only) doesn’t seem technical (I wager it’s to do with abuse).
Regardless, my point was, with credential-less, Proton is on its way to removing the need for “user registration”.
Yes. The latter is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the former.
3 Likes
How so?
Just wanted to comment that I enjoy the dialogue between everyone mainly because I learn a lot from it all!
2 Likes
About trustworthyness, I definitely trust Mullvad more than Proton.
1 Like
Why? I thought both were equally reputable among privacy enthusiasts.
Because you can pay Mullvad with actual crypto, not only shitcoins like BTC.
2 Likes
This being the case, and leading to the inevitable and well-established conclusion that VPNs are not anonymity tools, aren’t Protons’ credential-less accounts also fairly “useless as a differentiator” in favour of them?
It is true that you cannot hide the fact that you have bought a Mullvad gift card from a third party (store, government, can be whoever). However, that doesn’t really matter. A third party (ISP, government) will already be able to identify the fact that you are using Mullvad VPN, which is the same as a credential-less Proton account. No third party can link the gift card to a specific Mullvad account, so your account remains just as anonymous as a credential-less Proton account.
I disagree. Neither will prevent a third party from knowing that you are connecting to a VPN, but both will prevent a third party from identifying you as the owner of a specific account. Paying using a gift card prevents anyone but you from trying to take that account over yourself (easily mitigated by destroying the gift card after use).
A credential-less account requires some identifiers including encryption keys in the same way as a random account number which Mullvad uses; that it is not user-facing doesn’t really change this (this seems logically sound to me but I could be wrong, I don’t know the exact back-end design of the feature).
1 Like
I’m getting a sense that some of the dialogue here is concerning the level of threat we are trying to solve and another thread is how much we trust the business architecture of Proton vs Mullvad.
My particular threat model is currently simply trying to reduce my overall Privacy footprint. Total anonymity appears to be so difficult and results in the loss of lifestyle conveniences. I of course wish we lived in a less “1984” type of surveillance world but that just doesn’t appear to be reality.
If reputation is to be believed, I don’t have the technical information tell if Proton is more focused on business growth at the expense of Privacy or not. Mullvad just appears to be focused on providing a product intent on Privacy is all.
Again, my current threat model is just to smartly reduce data collection exposure if at all possible.
Sure appreciate this forums members discussions!
2 Likes
The OPs question has definitely been answered, and we are cutting teeth on two of the recommended VPNs. Not to say it isn’t useful, but the dialogue is becoming a bit circular imo.
1 Like