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.
Ties to Israel are never a good thing.
I think we’re on the same page but you might be exaggerating a bit here. Everything is connected in this world.
Bad news, the sun shines in Israel and provides illegal settlers with vitamin D therefore it must have ties to genocide. BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!
BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!
we already are, that’s why there’s no mass adoption of solar panels and electric vehicles in most of the world despite both being dirt cheap from china and we’ve doubled down on drilling/extracting fossil fuels to the highest levels ever in history while simultaneously quadrupling our energy usage via datacenters for AI.
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 would posit that it is actually important to have VPN exit nodes in Israel. The Israelis often try to hide their open evil by posting in Hebrew, adding a hoop to find out they’re as monstrous as they are. It’s quite possible in the future Hebrew sources will have two versions of everything – a real internal version talking about being the master race and exterminating all other races, and a sanitized version for foreign IPs. Access to Israeli IPs are the best way to out that when it happens.
aka: the american strategy
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.
How does having an exit node in Israel equal a VPN being corrupted?
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.
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.
hosting servers in that region support genocide?
yes, it’s occupied land, it’s not like those servers are in tunnels in Gaza, paying fees to Palestinians
It’s the same in many places, and more often than not israel is held up as a special example
Remember me of a guy who said that being paid by the CIA doesnt mean youre actually working for the CIA.
Would you buy a volkswagen in the 1940s?
Could you explain why this is the same?
In one case you have a company tied to a nazi regime, in the other case you have a company tied to a nazi regime. Hope this helps
You sir have made my day. Thank you.
Proton has servers in 127 countries, including Cuba, Russia, Venezuela… do they all count as ties?
You’re here comparing Venezuela and Cuba to nazis, get out you pig
Yes, but afaik they are not nazis nor are involved in the kind of genocidal actions israel is
Proton has servers in both Russia and Ukraine, and neither means Proton has ties with their governments. If you want to expand an Israel boycott to anyone doing business with any company from Israel then ok, but the word “ties” seems to imply some involvement or complicity with a government/regime/ideology, like they are connected to anything said place is doing.
Removed by mod
Sure bro, the country that ended nazi germany is actually nazi.
Mullvad or ivpn for vpn, tutanota or posteo for mail.
Also stop looking at advertisements for privacy tools and services.
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).
Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.
It’s not some kind of secret that Proton supports genocide. They brag about it.
I see them saying they are making sure people have access to things that are only allowed from IS IP addresses, outside of that they didnt speak to any political matters. But again saying they make money off these things (which yes they will) is the taint then I would ask you for the VPN service that doesnt have a node there. (and being able to see TV station from the region is good, we can see as outsiders the local and nation news they dont show us as observers).
There are plenty of problems with Proton, but since they have a VPN service it means they probably have an exit node in Israhell. I’m pretty sure any VPN that masks traffic as coming from Israhell will do the same. I’m not saying that it’s not worth looking for one that doesn’t do business in Israhell, it just might be hard to find. If you ever need to exit through that node, just make sure your encryption is maxed, with quantum encryption preferably, and avoid doing anything sensitive over that node.
I’m a big fan of mullvad
Mulvad is the first group that really gets me. Good because they care about the idea, cheap because they aren’t trying to choke me for money, and they take cash.
but doesnt mullvad have an exit node in Isreal too? Wouldnt that just be the same boat this person (OP) put proton in for?
Source?
Who upvotes this nonsense without searching? It’s all over the place.
Do you have information on proton’s Israel links? I know they used radware several years ago but no longer do.
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.
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.
Not sure why people would downvote this completely reasonable question.
it goes against the same sort of groupthink that maga and vote-blue-no-matter-who does.
It’s kind of amazing how many people are asking for references without doing the bare minimum of searching.
Instead of replying to every dufus in here:
https://protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers
Search the rest for yourself.
“we’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing”
– proton
