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Proton has ties to Israel. What's a safe alternative?
(lemmy.world)
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
It's not operating in a bad country that makes the vpn bad, but the fact that the country is known for its surveillance of VPNs there that makes it bad.
I’m afraid I may have not been clear enough.
There are solid reasons for operating vpn servers in Israel other than simply paying for the privilege of being allowed to let unit 8200 in to your system.
Those reasons, the privacy and restriction bypassing power the VPNs customers pay for, must be measured against the danger of releasing their customers data to the country in which the server is hosted.
At the same time, it requires a higher degree of trust than even what you would normally expect from a vpn provider.
In a situation like this where there are (someone like me might say noble) reasons for dipping one’s corporate sack into that bubbling crucible, we have to trust that the corporate sack has an industrial grade asbestos athletic protector covering it.
As I said above, there is good reason to believe that is the case. Mullvads proclaimed no logging system was so resilient that Interpol (who I need to be clear are not the clouseau esque bumblers of media, but a powerful and far reaching law enforcement agency) had to settle for calling in the major cdns to blacklist mullvads servers instead of succeeding at any of their lawful searches and attempts to log traffic across a broad and compliant jurisdiction.
The result of their pressure on the cdns was that the cdns did blacklist mullvad and mullvad, rather than comply with the search, simply discontinued the port forwarding feature that law enforcement claimed was key to the investigation.
The investigation was concerning cp trading over windows cifs (the right click share) with forwarded ports. Having seen several write ups on how it was being used, and having used forwarded ports with cifs to make a fake vpn between two office buildings, mullvad was the only real security layer in that operation.
Mullvad chose to discontinue what I truly believe was their most loved feature over letting the cops in on principle. They were put in the position of being able to make that choice because their system stood up to lawful attempts to confiscate and bug it.
It is clear to me that mullvad seems to be trustworthy and has a resilient system. If anyone can safely host a vpn server in Israel it’s them.
Because we can establish reasonable trust in one organization to do something, it’s reasonable to recognize that another might also be able to do something. There are a host of comparisons to be made between the two organizations, but the point of by replies was to establish that the simple fact of a vpn server in Israel doesn’t imply endorsement of, compliance with or a danger to the users of that service or server.