berserk bells recognise gray gaping smell strong impolite encouraging practice
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
Yeah, a small paid VPN is about as safe as it gets, especially if it’s in a country with strong privacy laws. I have a relatively small ISP and live in the EU, so I’m not terribly worried. I don’t want to spend money on services that potentially downgrade my privacy, but of course not everyone is in the same situation as I am.
It s not the company you need to worry about though. It s what country they are based in that matters. Search for the “5 eyes alliance”.
I am not recommending moving away from a service that has free tier. Maybe they are doing an excellent job with the paid tier. You need to do your research on that.
You can also check google or Reddit. Make a search about “Top/Best/Good/Reliable” (Pick one) vpn service providers. In Reddit especially such posts will have comments with a lot of details.
Yes, directly to the snooping vpn provider.
it’s a question of whether you trust your VPN provider more than your ISP.
And the answer is clear: Your ISP knows much more about you than your VPN does. ISP knows your real home postal address, for example. So malice by the ISP can do a lot more damage to you than malice by the VPN.
I don’t trust either ISP or VPN. But using a VPN gives me some compartmentalization. And I gave (mostly) fake data to the VPN when I signed up for it.
Any company will look out for their interests over your interests, in any country. The best you can do is encrypt, compartmentalize, don’t be low-hanging fruit.
I don’t trust my VPN, at ALL. But my traffic through them is HTTPS. And I’d rather reveal my traffic metrics (IP addresses, etc) to the VPN than to add to the PILE of data my ISP has about me.