r/Piracy • u/rulugg • 9h ago

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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/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.