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Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

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201 points sdsantos | 2 comments | 03 Sep 25 16:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.648s | source
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fujigawa ◴[03 Sep 25 17:28 UTC] No.45118394[source]▶
Commercial VPNs will go down as one of the greatest money-making schemes of the last decade. Outside of a few specific use cases their sales often rely on leveraging non-technical users' fear of what they don't fully understand.

I have non-technical friends and relatives that have fully bought into this and when I asked why they use a VPN I got non-specific answers like "you need it for security", "to prevent identity theft", or my personal favorite: "to protect my bank accounts".

Not a single person has said "I pay to route my traffic through an unknown intermediary to obscure its origin" or "I installed new root certificates to increase my security."

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davepeck ◴[03 Sep 25 17:45 UTC] No.45118558[source]▶
Long ago, in the era of Firesheep and exploding prevalence of coffee-shop Wi-Fi, consumer VPN services were definitely valuable.

But that was long ago. Now, HTTPS is the norm. The only use cases for consumer VPNs today seem to be (1) "pretend I'm in a different geography so I can stream that show I wanted to see" and (2) "torrent with slightly greater impunity".

I live in Seattle and Mullvad VPN seems to have bought approximately all of the ad space on public transit over the past couple months. Their messaging is all about "freeing the internet" and fighting the power. It's deeply silly and, I worry, probably quite good at attracting new customers who have no need for (or understanding of) VPNs whatsoever.

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atkailash ◴[03 Sep 25 19:51 UTC] No.45119763[source]▶
Times Square at one point was practically half full of Mullvad ads. I already distrusted it but the sheer amount of money they spent to do that made it shadier to me
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jorvi ◴[03 Sep 25 22:18 UTC] No.45120980[source]▶
Mullvad is rather principled on privacy. You can't even make a real account, you can only generate an account number that you can charge, and I assume they do some sort of clever tricks to keep themselves as blind as possible to who uses the account number. Firefox Relay is also just whitelabeled Mullvad, so they have Mozilla's stamp of approval.

Of the big VPNs, the only one's that have ever felt shady to me are NordVPN and Private Internet Access. NordVPN because of the sheer amount of false advertising they pay YouTubers to do, and Private Internet Access because of how cheap they are and how poorly they maintain their infrastructure. Their .ovpn generated files haven't worked for 2+ years now because they include certificates with malformed revocation dates, and refuse to pay the certificate authority to update them.

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1. ThrowMeAway1618 ◴[04 Sep 25 00:41 UTC] No.45122079[source]▶
>Mullvad is rather principled on privacy. You can't even make a real account, you can only generate an account number that you can charge, and I assume they do some sort of clever tricks to keep themselves as blind as possible to who uses the account number. Firefox Relay is also just whitelabeled Mullvad, so they have Mozilla's stamp of approval.

Yep. And I use the VPN connection (and/or TOR) to re-up my Mullvad VPN when I run low.

Mostly I use the VPN to protect my privacy when posting with a throwaway account here and/or other sites. And of course for torrenting.

What's more, I had some monero (XMR) left over from some other transactions, so I use that to pay for the VPN connection.

As such, unless Mullvad is storing the IP address from which I connect (and they claim they do not), it would be difficult (but not impossible -- I don't always use VPN when posting anonymously/throwaway -- that isn't a challenge!) to identify me through my VPN connections.

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2. crossroadsguy ◴[04 Sep 25 08:02 UTC] No.45124834[source]▶
> my privacy when posting with a throwaway account here

What's the data/IP/etc retention logging situation of HN? Do they have a page on it?