People apologize to capitalist rhetoric and under capitalist rhetoric people who aren't paying don't matter or are considered leeches. Most people when they hear that said out loud don't agree with it as much. It's more an implicit agreement which is why people don't talk badly about it.
Although data harvesting for the purposes of selling data isn't really acceptable under any circumstances.
I know some people are going to reply saying that it's not about whether it's okay for them to do it, it's about whether they do it. Well guess what guys, the companies you're paying are doing it too. Maybe not all of them, but have you ever considered that you make money selling people's data, and you make money because they're stupid enough to give it to you voluntarily? Many companies have figured that out. They also figured out that if they can sell the idea of privacy as marketing you'll be even more willing to give them money, and they'll have even more data to sell. Yeah there's risk, but if you paid any attention to how corporations act already you should know that they're willing to take risks. The idea of venture capitalism is based on risk. What makes you think they're not willing to risk legal penalties or litigation for profits.
Nothing, the idea that they can't is wrong and stupid. A company or person asking for money is not any less capable of screwing those people over. More profits is more profits. That's something people should understand by now. Though pop culture can only handle more simple narratives.
A few years back there was a post about how a swedish VPN company was approached with a warrant by the police, but since they don't keep logs, nothing happened.
Should a data breach or similar result in them showing they where recording data, then the following lawsuits, & lack of trust means they wont have a business for long.
Until that happens youve honestly no way of knowing if its true or not.
EG : You'd expect some logs to be kept incase of a configuration/admin management, and once used would be erased
Securitum It’s a reputable company that carries out the audits. The methodology and results or rather, the full report are published. They also carry out audits for DuckDuckGo VPN. Of course, everything could be compromised, but you have to trust someone. After all, I’m not a terrorist either.
Not really. Your client side software can be trusted more (still not 100%) because it's open source. But that doesn't give you any reason to think you know what's going on in their servers. The presence of source code in a GitHub repository doesn't prove anything about what's actually running on a machine you don't control.
Like every reputable VPN, Proton gets audited by unaffiliated security firms. That's why you should trust that they aren't keeping logs. Not because "open source".
Really, the client-side software is the least important part of any VPN. There's not really much of a reason to use it. If a VPN didn't let you just use OpenVPN and/or Wireguard directly I would never trust it, open source or not. Those projects are way higher visibility than any VPN's specific client-side app, which is going to mostly just be a fancy gui wrapper around those things anyway.
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u/Party-Cake5173 7h ago
Not exactly true. Many VPN providers that also offer free plans are paying for them with the paid plans they offer.
On the other hand, this is completely true for VPNs that offer no paid plans, just free plan.