Of course, you can never expect someone else to help you break the law, but these cases are good “stress tests” of promises a VPN company makes. In this case, I think it is evident that Proton’s statement of “we don’t collect logs” was plainly misleading, when that is exactly what they were doing (for a minor crime at that.)
Perhaps Mullvad can be compelled to do the same thing, but
They claim they cannot be forced to add such functionality under the Swedish jurisdiction, and if forced to do so, they will shut down
They collect far less information on account creation
I have nothing against Proton as a company, I subscribe to one of the more expensive ProtonMail plans. I am just trying to answer OP’s questions based off of what we know about the two companies.
Any VPN will abide by court orders, and there’s no real evidence he even was a climate activist besides some post a friend of his made on twitter. This was pretty much debunked ages ago. Some crappy news sources kinda ran with the “climate activist” thing for sensationalist clickbait reasons and that basically stuck.
You can find their transparency statement at the link below. It shows how many court orders per year they get, how many they fight against and how many they follow through with.
Remember that is mostly the email end as they said they keep no logs of vpn use to hand over.
Seeing as we have never heard of ProtonVPN helping to bust someone despite all the court orders followed it stands to reason they do in fact hold to their word on this.
My advice? Their VPN is solid, safe. Their email or anything that sits on their server? Not so safe so encrypt all with a strong password if you feel the Swiss would agree to such a legal court order from another government for what you do.
Highly illegal activities are the only way most of the time. But whistleblowing? Reporting? Need extra security.
Hope this link and information helps, here are list from last two years if you do not want to click.
Can you please elaborate more as to why it isn’t safe? Is Proton Mail not fully E2EE? AFAIK, certain metadata (such as the subject of the mail) aren’t encrypted. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Did you really read the article? It’s not ProtonVpn, but Protonmail. This is discussed thousands of times. If the climate activists had used any vpn, then they were not being exposed. You should not rely on email for very sensitive communications.
Moreover, Protonmail did not provide any content, only IP addresses, meaning that they really have E2EE, and cannot access your messages.
I have no information about this case, but like @dngray I hardly believe France requested from Switzerland to track those guys for being climate activists
I heard some complaints from law enforcement guys that criminals use Protonmail to evade them, or sending threats to the healthcare professionals during the covid period. Protonmail did not respond to the most requests. They were thing Proton as a heaven for criminals and I tried to explain that it’s privacy preserving company which received funding from the Swiss govt and EU. They were very surprised.
Edit by dngray: There is no evidence they were even climate activists, that was never supported by any court documentation, it’s literally based on a tweet a friend of the person made at the time and some media sources went with it.
I use Proton VPN for personal and Mullvad for work, and they’re both great.
I tend to recommend Proton VPN to anyone who’s already using their suite of products (mail, drive, calendar, pass), and Mullvad otherwise. If you’re already paying for Proton Mail, there’s no (or little) reason to pay for Mullvad. If you’re not, there’s little advantage to paying for Proton VPN.
I’d say Mullvad cares more about privacy since they don’t store identifying information, and I trust that they’d rather shut down than release someone’s info to authorities. But that’s not to say that Proton doesn’t care about privacy, and that difference is probably irrelevant to most people who use a VPN anyway. I also think that Proton VPN would probably work better with streaming or torrenting.
If you don’t feel good about Proton, use Mullvad. You really can’t go wrong here though.
As a Linux user: the Proton VPN experience is pretty bad.
As an Android user: the experience is almost perfect.
The Linux client doesn’t even supports kill switch or WireGuard(!) yet, and the UI is bare bones. But I got it for $1, so not a big deal. Would never buy it on the original price, though.
If you are an Android or Windows user it’s just a matter of “I already use the Proton suite, should I use it as well?”, I guess. They are both pretty good (can’t say anything for Apple’s operating systems).
In my use case, Mullvad or even iVPN would be the best option, no doubt.
Mullvad works great on ubuntu (based) distros, but their application is not working on opensuse (officially .rpm is only for Fedora), so I use network manager to set VPN connections (wireguard or openpn)
iVPN works well on opensuse, proably on other distros also, but still, I stayed with Mullvad, mainly due to price
For Proton, I didn’t test the unofficial Flatpak app, I don’t know whether it’s working well.
However, I’m using Proton VPN through wg-quick with some minor issue, e.g. trying to edit the connection settings via the network manager will crash the settings altogether. And the instruction on Proton’s website is not working for me at all, as my system won’t accept any configuration file if it’s not named as wg0. Other than that, everything seems to work fine on openSUSE here.
I hope Proton officially packages the client using Flatpak. I would use the service seriously (become a paying customer). Now, it’s just a nice to have tool in my pocket. There are requests for Flatpak package on the official feature request forum:
For me pricing would be the biggest factor, which VPN has the best price, the same security features, independent audits… It may not even be Mullvad or Proton, I don’t know.
Neither. The best is IVPN since the clients are well-designed, there’s V2Ray support, and the company behind it doesn’t oversell its value for anonymity. This is in contrast with others who openly promote using their app to connect to Tor.
I have Mullvad and Proton both each there purpose for me,but I mostly use Mullvad. I have Proton VPN because it’s bundle with my Proton Mail has a premium client.
I lack the resources and technical acumen to determine if IVPN is truly the best of the three PG recommended providers, but it’s a better fit for my needs when compared to Mullvad.
Where I’m located, I don’t have the buffet of performant servers (in terms of latency) those of you in the US or EU have, but IVPN at least offers two nodes relatively close to my location, while Mullvad offers just one. Makes a huge difference when I have peering issues (useless ISP) or if I want to double-hop.
IVPN’s mobile apps are also higher quality (imho) than Mullvad’s, especially the iOS/iPadOS build, which offers a lot of functionality compared to Mullvad’s which feels like an afterthought. IVPN’s ad/tracker blocking is also superior, more so after they added the ability to select from multiple filterlist combinations.
Can’t say anything about ProtonVPN since I’ve never been attracted to them (personal reasons, none of which are related to privacy or security), but it does make for a sensible option (financially) if you’re getting it bundled with their mail service, I suppose.
I use two, Mullvad and Airvpn. Reason for Airvpn, port forwarding. It’s only used on one device for the sole purpose of torrenting linux iso’s. The UI is terrible, it’s extremely difficult to configure, but the speeds are extremely fast and the connections are stable, it has never dropped.
And for mullvad, multihop nearby servers from two different companies. That on top of Tor and/or mullvad browser. My only complaint being webrtc is enabled by default with mullvad browser. I emailed them but they said it was standard, turn it off in the extension if you dont want it. There’s no legitimate reason to have it enabled, they dropped the ball there.
Proton was good! They even have port forwarding. But they’re too expensive and their Protonmail service has questionable business practices, which leaves too much room for doubt imho. I would never trust them with anything sensitive, but that’s just me. I’ve heard it goes on sale once in a while but have yet to see anything.