this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
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Privacy
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lol, k, I definitely respect the opinion of someone who drops a half-assed comment like that without bothering to offer what they believe to be the correct information.
I can't presume to know what they meant, specifically, but I think they're probably referring to the fact that a VPN provider has access to all of the data you're transmitting through their exit nodes, and a malicious one could harvest and sell it. Or work with LE and hand over all tracking data, all information about your browsing habits for the past year, all of the times you visited PornHub and Grinr, how many times you visited that trans support website... everything LE could get by surveiling your behavior if you weren't using a VPN.
A VPN is only worth how trustworthy the VPN provider is. Mullvad, for instance, claims to keep no logs, so a search warrant for logged data is useless. This is not true of all VPN providers.
If that's the case then both of you failed to read the part of my comment where I explicitly addressed that:
I admit I didn't include the possibility of the VPN operator themselves being malicious, but it seems weird to call me out for not addressing the issue of record security re:governments/LE when pretty much the entire point of my comment was to address that specific issue because no one else was, no?
You start with "a VPN is a VPN." However you qualify it, it's not true unless you're merely stating a tautology, which doesn't seem constructive or helpful.