Look folks. In short things can be summed up to the following:
1:According to PG criteria, Proton falls short of what they claim (my personal opinion: over advertising your abilities is scummy. They should have had a disclaimer on their killswitch).
2: Proton still is one of the few companies that are actually in the running to even be considered for VPNs, and they have other products (ProtonDrive, ProtonMail) that are quite good. There are VERY few other VPNs that can be recommended. And Proton is still the best free tier.
3: So what do we do about it? I have 2 suggestions:
First, PG doesn’t remove ProtonVPN, but puts an easy-to-see disclaimer about their abilities. That way nobody is misguided.
Second, how about PG team contacts Proton directly, and tries to open a dialogue regarding the concern and furor this has caused in the community. See if Proton is willing to address this/patch their killswitch, or fix their marketing. If Proton does, it would be a show of good faith that might restore some trust.
Removing ProtonVPN is not banning them forever, it’s just until they fix the issue. If they care about being promoted here for free (and I believe they do and should), they will put fixing this in top of their list. I have ProtonVPN and love it, and as we say in french : those who love well chastise well.
Policing service providers for their marketing strategies/VPN client misbehavior is outrageous. While the topic on VPN leaks is much needed, there’s no need to create ragebait topics.
It’d be a fun experiment to explore marketing materials of PG’s recommended services. You’d be surprised to see how many companies oversell their product. If PG will start enforcing this rule - they’ll have to remove 99% of recommendations from the website.
Please provide examples and empirical info if that’s your claim. But please make new post, commenting about all the details here will be off topic and hence derail the discussion of this thread.
With the VPN providers we recommend we like to see responsible marketing.
At this point all these VPN discussions are kind of stale. Basically the only productive thing to do for this issue and the related VPN threads is to wait for staff to decide, when the holidays end.
This topic only has 9 votes so sadly they may decide its not popular enough to respond to and just let it sit in site development pergatory like numerous other threads.
People have pointed out in this post that Mullvad VPN and IVPN also do not or will not support kill switch functionality on iOS. Someone should firstly verify if that is true. Secondly, if it is true, someone should look into why that is.
If it’s because (a) the VPN product itself is technically unable to provide the functionality, then I understand why it should be removed. However, if it’s because (b) iOS is technically limited and unable to provide proper kill switch functionality, then we should alert our readers to that fact and not discount VPN products that do not provide the functionality because of iOS’s technical limitation.
As of right now, this seems to be an empirical task, not a theorizing task.
Proton fails on Linux, where kill switches are possible. Commentators have also alleged the same on MacOS, but I am unsure if it is actually possible on the platform (since I don’t use it), Mac users can correct me.
It not working in iOS due to platform limitations is not the core issue. If you wish to argue in favour of advising against VPN usage in that ecosystem, that would be a new thread.
Re-reading the beginning of the thread will help with context on what is already discussed.
off topic
No one is entitled to a voice in a private space like this forum. Although I too disagree with moderation decisions on various platforms, I find it more productive to flag violations than add to them by continuing violations discussions.
Opening a meta discussion about this would be more suitable than continuing to pollute this thread.
You named your recommendation aptly. You’re indeed proposing weaker guarantees which deviate away from what both PG & public VPN providers claim to enforce.
is @jonah or @staff going to respond to any of these VPN posts that came out during the holidays? It seems odd to let these issues of reccomendations possibly not meeting the criteria get buried.
I guess because there was so much discussion during the holidays, the internal deliberations may be taking longer to come up with a plan to address this properly while trying to keep maintaining the goal for what PG does.
I’m only comfortable giving them til the end of the month at most since many were taking a long break in the holidays until almost two weeks ago.
If it still doesn’t happen by then, I will be upset among other things and the community should (only then) begin reading more into the questionable non action on the matter.
(but that’s just what I think.. everyone has their own views and thresholds)
This is kind of what I figured. They do seem to move at glacially slow speeds when it comes to answering tool suggestions. I just had assumed these may be more urgent to atleast get some sort of response out (even if its just what the staff is considering) as the issue is core to how reccomendations are handled.
