VPN solutions in Freedombox are OpenVPN and WireGuard, which receive no mention in PG’s recommendations as services in themselves, but are nevertheless referred to as selection criteria for inclusion of the recommended providers, which must ‘support WireGuard & OpenVPN’. What are the latter if not VPN providers like Proton or Mullvad? And how does using OpenVPN or Wireguard on Freedombox compare with using the recommended providers in terms of privacy?
It’s kind of an apples to oranges comparison. We recommend commercial/consumer VPN providers, not VPN software. Self-hosting a VPN provides a totally different set of benefits compared to using a public VPN provider like Proton, etc.
Using one of our recommended VPN services is for hiding your IP address from websites, hiding your network traffic from other people on your local network, and bypassing rudimentary censorship or filtering by your ISP.
Self-hosting a VPN on something like Freedombox doesn’t really do any of those things, but it does have other benefits like being able to access your self-hosted/local services remotely, etc. - We do not publish any recommendations on this subject (yet).
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