I wanted to ask your opinion about choosing a VPN provider.
I saw on the website that Proton, IVPN and Mullvad are recommended.
I’m debating between Mullvad or Proton but I feel like Mullvad is more privacy oriented even though it’s listed number 3 on the website.
For some reason I feel like Proton are not totally transparent with their VPN service, and I also took a look at their GitHub repository and noticed they didn’t update the macOS code for a long time which makes me wonder if I can really trust them.
I would always choose Mullvad, they feel more transparent about everything and have fair pricing. There is also a browser extension so you can utilize SOCKS5 proxy to change country without changing servers.
But if you use MacOS there is not split tunneling support yet, although I think you can use a different VPN client to achieve this.
I prefer Mullvad because they don’t force you into a multi-year deal, have a lot of owned servers that run on RAM, and offer anonymous registration and payment options.
Thanks,
May I ask how do you pay for Mullvad ?
And also will it be a bad practice to pay with apple in app purchase instead of more anonymous payment method ? It’s just very convenient to pay for every month separately.
I pay with Monero and cash, but using something like Apple’s in-app purchase is also probably just fine. Here Mullvad also explains what information it stores regarding different payment methods if you’re interested.
As a rule of thumb, you probably should not use services from companies you don’t trust if you can avoid it.
Mullvad has been the gold standard for years so unless there is a feature that is critical to you that they don’t have, they will always be a top choice.
I use both, and my recommendation would be to use Proton if you 1: already have Proton Unlimited or 2: want to use it for streaming services like Netflix. Otherwise, I’d go for Mullvad. They’re both excellent options and hard to go wrong with either imo.
I use Mullvad VPN, and I’m very happy with the service. I really recommend them, of course streaming services will not really work with it, though that isn’t one of my use-cases at all.
I have used Mullvad for about a year and it worked great. Switching to Proton VPN due to a bigger shift to Proton and so far so good. I’d say both are good from a security and privacy situation, but Mullvad I think edges out the win because of the private ways to pay and no subscription. As you can see, that piece might not even be relevant for you unless you plan on using the more private payment options.
IMO, if you can’t trust Proton then just use Mullvad.
Not saying Proton isn’t safe or anything, but Mullvad seems to be more transparent, and account creation is more private than Proton.
But depending on your use case, if you want to torrent or stream movies, I would go with Proton as they seem to have support for port forwarding and servers for streaming. If you just want to browse the internet and don’t really care about that, Mullvad is a great choice, and it should work for streaming as well.
(I should also note that I never used Proton’s premium plan, this is just from what I saw on their website, but I do use Mullvad.)
I have not faced a single reasonable explanation why Proton cannot be trusted so far. You may not like its UI, pricing etc, but their products are very robust privacy and security-wise. So, dont mix your feelings with the reality on the ground.
It’s not the UI, in my opinion it’s great, but as I said in my original post their open source repository for macOS app wasn’t updated since May 15, which in my opinion means they’re using different code to publish new releases and not their open source code.
Proton vpn disabled port forwarding some time ago, just like mullvad disabled it. Its hard finding a vpn that support that on pg. Pg has not been updated to reflect it. I think ivpn still does, but havent checked.
@rollsicecream@Redoomed@anon58739604
Seems I was mistaken and co fused with mullvad.
mullvad removed port forwarding source
Ivpn does not support it source
Proton seems yo still support it. I wonder if its easy to do it on a wireguatd enabled router.
So ProtonVPN doesn’t collect logs “by default”, but the second you do something interesting (in this case, the activist was merely squatting), they will enable logging on your account.
It does not look like to me that Mullvad has this ability, as accounts are not connected to email or other identifiable information. In my view, Mullvad has put much more thought into their signup flow to prevent issues like the above.
Still, both services know your home IP, so theoretically, both services could theoretically be compelled to build functionality to log connections from a given IP (as opposed to email/account.) But I’ve not seen any evidence of this.
As it has always been, you should not rely on VPN or email if your threat model includes any degree of privacy or anonymity from law enforcement. A legal case effectively reminding people of this fact doesn’t make a particular privacy-oriented product less private from e.g., big tech or companies wanting to send DMCAs