Proton VPN/mail. It’s often recommended as being safe, but I’m not so sure.
It has servers in Israel. Ties to Israel are never a good thing. Palantir, Epstein, etc are tied to Israel, and Israel also is known for its surveillance. It is also true that it’s completely legal there for them to access and monitor any and all information that passes through VPNs or networks there.
I’m looking for a safe alternative that’s privacy-conscious and isn’t linked to Israel. Both mail and vpn (it’s fine if they’re separate). Please let me know if you guys know.
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Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now? Making this jump to liken it to Epstein or Palantir is kinda wild imo
Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now?
Yes, absolutely. Profiting from servers under genocidal control is literally being materially tied to genocide.
Like I hear what you’re saying. I’m on the fuck Israel train as much as everyone but how does them hosting servers in that region support genocide? Are they giving money to the Israeli government? Defending the IDF?
Like there is McDonald’s in Israel does that mean McDonald’s is complicit in genocide? (I actually don’t know if they give money to support Israel but my point is more broad than that and might be a bad example)
Edit: Also for the McD’s example I guess they make money off of Israelis but I still posit that is different to a large degree with being complicit in genocide.
It’s not about supporting genocide that I’m concerned about over here per se (though it’s obviously not a good look), it’s the fact that the region is known for surveillance through any comms that enter it.
Unrelated, but yes, people against genocide literally boycott any businesses that operate in Israel, including McDonalds. BDS movement, for example.
Having exit nodes for their VPN is not the same as collaborating with the government. There is no evidence that the Israeli government has access to any of their information, their servers are hosted in Switzerland.
I have my issues with proton because of its CEO and some weird decisions for their product lone and don’t use them at all. I.e. I won’t defend this company.
Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.
Because of this: my advice is to decouple your privacy concerns and thoughts from politics in the first degree (rhetoric and hearsay). Base it ok policies, observable behavior, audits, laws and so on…your example: exit nodes for VPNs don’t have an impact on security at all in neither direction. Hosting infrastructure there would (i.e. it would increase potential access and put the infrastructure under additional legal requirements).
Complete bullshit by a trolling OP. Israel is cancer, but OP is doing an obvious smear on Proton to try to agitate leftists. Case in point: Mullvad and most other VPNs have exit nodes in Israel.
It is a dumbfuck corporate decision that has absolutely no more bearing on your VPN’s privacy than routing through the US or Australia. You are truly completely confused.
Also “its” doesn’t have an apostrophe when used as a possessive, you fucking idiot.
Just because mullvad and most other VPNs do something, doesn’t mean it’s good.
Israel is known for a level of surveillance that most other countries aren’t.
The rest of what you’ve said is just ad hominem I’m not interested in.
The idea that you’re not interested in being called out is not unusual.
You have a bone to pick with Proton. It is evident as you’ve singled them out without mentioning this is industry standard. You have a problem with the VPN industry that you are solely blaming Proton for in your post title.
You are a weird little agitator and deserve many more ad hominems. Get wrecked.
I responded to the aspects of your argument that weren’t personal attacks. Personal attacks, yes, I am not interested in.
‘‘Industry standard’’ doesn’t mean anything. Government surveillance and everything this sub stands against is ‘‘industry standard’’. Just because everyone’s doing it doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
I ‘‘singled out’’ Proton because it was the VPN I used the most prior. I’m not sure why that’s a problem.
Are you able to discuss things based on criticisms of logical reasoning and evidence, or are you going to continue to respond with personal attacks? I am open to critique.
Proton is garbage though. They immediately disabled my account after I set it up, as I’m on some blacklist by some brazillian firm, they didn’t tell me that part, they said suspicious activity. I do nothing illegal, or spammy either, I read the news and use some social media.
Anyway they gave me no way to appeal. The other main one that doesn’t require a phone number or existing email let me appeal and approved it.
Now why am I on some shady blacklist that tech companies use to discriminate against people for? I can only speculate, but I suspect it’s an Israel thing.
Not sure why people would downvote this completely reasonable question.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any VPN services that actively oppose genocide. I would like to know as well.
It’s part of the misery of living in the imperial core. The whole of capitalism is based on genocide, etc.
Thank you. I’m baffled by how complacent people are to Israel’s involvement.
They don’t necessarily need to oppose the genocide but just not host any servers in the area (since that means they’ve access to it).
Your ties to Israel claim is more than just a little specious.
Mullvad, widely considered the gold standard for privacy, allows the user to select a server in Israel.
Aside from that nugget, consider not worrying too much about perfect email secrecy. Email isnt private, was never intended to be and has many, many vectors of attack which are so well documented and in such common use that ISPs have attacked email simply to promote end users running their service instead of the competition.
One VPN being openly corrupted doesn’t make another openly corrupted VPN safe.
I can only read this as the first vpn you refer to being mullvad and the second being proton.
It’s hard to understand how you can come to the conclusion that a vpn offering exit nodes (wrong terminology but bear with me) in a bad country makes the vpn service bad.
One of the types of traffic shaping and monitoring that vpns are used to avoid is geofencing, where your ip address is a determinant of how your traffic is treated.
Users who are outside the bad country but want to be treated by its internet as if they are inside would use a vpn server inside the bad country.
Users who are inside the bad country and want to make a connection to the internet outside the bad country without being observed would use a vpn server inside the bad country.
Users whose internet backbone goes through the bad country would be well served by the vpn servers in the bad country.
There are many other situations where a vpn with servers inside a bad country might be useful, but those are just a few.
To put an extremely fine point on what I’m saying: mullvad users in gaza are well served by the single Tel Aviv mullvad server for self evident reasons. They must lean harder than others on mullvads unloggable design, the same one that caused Interpol to have their servers blacklisted until they disallowed port forwarding, but based on the history of that design and law enforcements inability to make hay out of it I think those users are safe.
It’s not operating in a bad country that makes the vpn bad, but the fact that the country is known for its surveillance of VPNs there that makes it bad.
I’m afraid I may have not been clear enough.
There are solid reasons for operating vpn servers in Israel other than simply paying for the privilege of being allowed to let unit 8200 in to your system.
Those reasons, the privacy and restriction bypassing power the VPNs customers pay for, must be measured against the danger of releasing their customers data to the country in which the server is hosted.
At the same time, it requires a higher degree of trust than even what you would normally expect from a vpn provider.
In a situation like this where there are (someone like me might say noble) reasons for dipping one’s corporate sack into that bubbling crucible, we have to trust that the corporate sack has an industrial grade asbestos athletic protector covering it.
As I said above, there is good reason to believe that is the case. Mullvads proclaimed no logging system was so resilient that Interpol (who I need to be clear are not the clouseau esque bumblers of media, but a powerful and far reaching law enforcement agency) had to settle for calling in the major cdns to blacklist mullvads servers instead of succeeding at any of their lawful searches and attempts to log traffic across a broad and compliant jurisdiction.
The result of their pressure on the cdns was that the cdns did blacklist mullvad and mullvad, rather than comply with the search, simply discontinued the port forwarding feature that law enforcement claimed was key to the investigation.
The investigation was concerning cp trading over windows cifs (the right click share) with forwarded ports. Having seen several write ups on how it was being used, and having used forwarded ports with cifs to make a fake vpn between two office buildings, mullvad was the only real security layer in that operation.
Mullvad chose to discontinue what I truly believe was their most loved feature over letting the cops in on principle. They were put in the position of being able to make that choice because their system stood up to lawful attempts to confiscate and bug it.
It is clear to me that mullvad seems to be trustworthy and has a resilient system. If anyone can safely host a vpn server in Israel it’s them.
Because we can establish reasonable trust in one organization to do something, it’s reasonable to recognize that another might also be able to do something. There are a host of comparisons to be made between the two organizations, but the point of by replies was to establish that the simple fact of a vpn server in Israel doesn’t imply endorsement of, compliance with or a danger to the users of that service or server.
To summarize, are you saying your trust in Mullvad’s ability to safely host in Israel comes from its decision to relinquish prized features to resist interpol searches?
That’s definitely not what I meant to write. In the words of our number one drone striker, uhh, let me be clear:
It’s much easier to believe that the Interpol was unable to successfully monitor or infiltrate mullvads servers even with warrants in multiple nations and instead took the alternate route of applying pressure to cdns and ISPs to blacklist the service as opposed to any other understanding because it’s much harder to convince everyone who handles packets globally to stop communicating with a set of IPs than it is to execute a search warrant that you have legal authorization and the specialized training and personnel for.
My interpretation of the reason that mullvad discontinuing port forwarding was acceptable to Interpol was that it would drive the people under investigation to either conduct their business under more compliant services or out in the open.
To directly address your concerns for your own choice of vpn:
If you’re worried about having your own data turned over to Israel, you can’t just rely on the physical location of servers to prevent that. The service you use needs to be trustworthy on its own because many nations comply with Israeli intelligence as a matter of course or as a matter of law. You may be well served by layering security instead of relying on just one service or connection in that case.
If your concern is not paying for a service that will eventually send that money to Israeli businesses or even to the government of that nation directly, that’s a toughie. Either because the region contains many motivated customers or because some VPNs are intelligence cutouts, a lot of VPNs have a server in Israel. Of the ones I use, airvpn doesn’t have any Israeli servers. I havent paid much attention to news about air and do not use it for sensitive communications. I do not recommend anyone use air for sensitive communications.
The concern is primarily about not letting Israel have my data; payments towards them isn’t. What would you recommend in terms of layering security? I am currently degoogling, getting rid of Meta apps, and switching from american for-profit socials to FOSS alternatives.
Do you have information on proton’s Israel links? I know they used radware several years ago but no longer do.
If you open the app Israel is literally listed as a server. It’s not hard to find.
That’s it? they’ve got some metal hosted in the country somewhere? I was expecting more.
Looking through the thread it seems you’re very keen on the end of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and privacy which is good but going after proton won’t help on either front here.
If you want to help stop the murder look into the BDS and the organisations they’re currently running boyoctts against and focus your efforts on those as those organisations are the ones propping up the Israeli state and allowing/assisting it to commit it’s crimes. community action against targets that matter will have a far more meaningful effects than going after a handful of servers. To this end also look up Palestinian organisations where you live to work with. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK is good example.
And on the privacy side I feel you seem to miss the point of how VPNs work. If you avoid ever setting your exit point to Israel then Israel will never see your traffic and be able to surveil it. Unless you have some evidence that Proton’s network has been compromised I can’t see any technical reason to avoid using Proton or any other provider running endpoints in Israel.
You have the ability to whip up this BS about proton, but a web search for “private email provider” was too much?
Wooosh. That search would be pretty useless to anybody who opposes genocide.
