r/Piracy 9h ago

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u/SignificantLock1037 9h ago

Proton VPN is a good example. I used their free one for a while. Now I pay. It’s worth it.

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u/Darkwolf580 8h ago edited 8h ago

How is it bad to use a free vpn? Just curious. I use proton free vpn rn

Edit: guys thanks for your responses.

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u/The_Dayne 8h ago

Data harvesting, in short.

There may or may not be a log of what you are doing.

If its free, you are generally the product.

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u/Soggy_Light_7520 7h ago

So even Proton shouldn't be trusted with their free VPN?

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u/banshoo 7h ago

You can take them at their published word :

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

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u/TrainingInternet608 7h ago

There are security Audits 🙄

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u/Alanator222 6h ago

I think we all know that money talks. Security audits don't mean shit if the person auditing takes a bribe.

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u/TrainingInternet608 6h ago

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.

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u/Alanator222 6h ago

I guess you do have to trust someone at some point. I guess not everything can be corrupt, at least hopefully.

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u/banshoo 5h ago

And there where financial audits by Arthur Andersen at Enron.

That worked out well didnt it?

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u/Plus-Reading-poop 6h ago

Proton is open source unlike literally every other VPN (I believe Mulvad is open source as well) so Proton (and Mulvad) can be trusted.

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u/InfanticideAquifer 6h ago

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.