In the wake of the Proton controversy, I've been looking towards alternatives towards their services. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a good alternative to ProtonVPN. I'm looking for the following in a VPN service:

  • Port forwarding support
  • Open source
  • Android app and Firefox extension available
  • Relatively cheap, around $3-4 month (okay with annual pricing)

The only options I found were Private Internet Access and Windscribe, but I found issues with them. If I'm cutting ties with Proton based on ideals I disagree with, I should be rejecting alternatives on the same basis.

Based on what I saw in the PIA subreddit, Private Internet Access seems to have some issues with service reliability and concerns about its ownership having ties to Israel, implying Zionist affiliation. Windscribe seems to have better service, but they have had a questionable social media history: edgy marketing including an AI-generated Hitler and a controversy where, according to them, they joked about a guy being mentally ill but their post easily looked like they were saying trans people are mentally ill.

Is there an option I missed? Should I try one of these options despite their faults? I'd like to know your thoughts.

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[–] 1 point 6 hours ago (1 child)

Oracle doesn't know what website I'm visiting. They know the IP

Let's say you see that I connected to the IP 168.107.12.213

What does that tell you? I honestly couldn't find much other than it's in Korea. Can't even find the address of the website that's using it. What can you tell me about this IP?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

    A single example doesn't say much. First off, most major websites can be determined by a whois or reverse dns lookup of their IP. 80% of your browsing history is still a lot of data.

    However as you've noticed, IP addresses don't always give away the website. The website owner might enabled registrar privacy. However that won't do much against a big tech company like Google, who can track and maintain mappings between websites and IPs. So if Oracle were to sell your proxy's traffic data to Google, Google could figure out what websites these IPs were correlated to.

    This doesn't always work though. Sometimes multiple websites are behind a CDN like Cloudflare, so the IP is just cloudflare's IP. This would be harder for Google to analyze, but it's still information. If Google has other data about the traffic, like timing data and payload sizes, they could guess which Cloudflare website it corresponds to. And even if they couldn't figure it out in the end, again, 80% of your data is still a lot of data.

    Edit: also, if you are now making the argument that IP address data does not reveal anything, then you are conceding that Oracle is not trustworthy from a privacy standpoint. In which case, why use an Oracle VPS at all? Why not just make those HTTPS requests from your home IP? All your ISP sees are requests to IP addresses, so according to you that should be fine right?

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