Honestly, nothing holds up to Mullvad [1]. They don't even take an email address while creating accounts, and you can pay easily with Bitcoin or even with cash mailed to them.<p>I'm not affiliated, just a <i>very</i> happy customer.<p>Mullvad is also who Mozilla trusts for the Mozilla VPN [2]. You can sign up with that if you'd like Mozilla to get a cut.<p>[1]: <a href="https://mullvad.net/" rel="nofollow">https://mullvad.net/</a>
[2]: <a href="https://vpn.mozilla.org/" rel="nofollow">https://vpn.mozilla.org/</a>
From the thread:<p>>The secret to not dealing with crapty company practices is to avoid ones that advertise literally everywhere 24/7 nonstop around every single corner you look.<p>This is so true it nearly qualifies as physics.
Why are these VPNs even a thing?<p>The only reason i would use one is to get cheaper steam keys from brasil and for that i can get a free one.<p>From a security standpoint it is awful because you increase the number of providers you have to trust.<p>Apart from your ISP and the server you connect to, you got a third party involved for no reason.<p>And VPNs can not that trustworhty as shown by the leaks of logs and what not.<p>Maybe someone can enlighten me why these services exist and what usecase they have?
By now these VPN providers are like toothpaste, diapers or soft drinks: completely undifferentiated between competitors, and so only able to maintain their market share by spending loads on marketing. Of course the company with most egregious dark patterns and aggressive churn dampening wins.<p>Thankfully a tube of toothpaste doesn't allow implementing dark patterns like this... yet.
The amount of astroturfing in the reddit thread is just awful.
VPN hosters market in the most aggressive ways possible, probably due to the fact that its usually impossible to verify a VPN hoster's claims (without a breach), so assuming they did most of the VPN stuff right, any new users they lured in are gonna stick, at least for a while.
I personally never liked the whole Nord ecosystem. I tried NordPass and encountered bug after bug and had to stop using it. The software seems kind of thrown together / shoddily made just to make a quick buck. They don't nearly put in as much passion and effort as better offerings like ProtonVPN and Mullvad (no affiliation, just really love their services).
I've used NordVPN previously and thought they were fine as a VPN service. In fact I went back to use them earlier today before seeing this submission. But yeah, on reflection, they really do go out of their way to scare/screw their customers into auto-renewing with various dark patterns. So maybe next time round I'll check out something less evil.<p>I use a VPN for geo blocked free-to-air sport(6 nations <3) from my home country so VPNs work well for my needs. Ironically it's not even possible to pay for access to view the sport in a legitimate way since everything is region locked.
This seems the work of some market-oblivious marketing "expert": we want more autorenewals, let's figure out some stick and carrot. Trust doesn't appear to be a consideration.
Has anyone actually been able to reproduce this? This annoyed me enough that I cancelled my NordVPN renewal, and I never got this screen - and all the adblock/anti-malware stuff still works fine.
Honestly, if you are worried about privacy and use a VPN for those reasons, then you should check out the principle of browser fingerprinting [0].<p>The conclusion is that servers/websites can check so many parameters of your browser that they can produce a (unique) fingerprint based on the settings and drivers on your phone. No VPN or Tor will cover that, only burner phones or pen and paper.<p>[0] <a href="https://coveryourtracks.eff.org" rel="nofollow">https://coveryourtracks.eff.org</a>
question for those privacy conscious peeps:<p>When you use multiple browsers, with 1 (FF) used for general browsing setup to blocks fingerprintin, all cookies, js, etc... will the <i>other</i> (Brave, Opera) browsers leak info to web sites, when using FF ?
What's the argument for VPNs in 2021? Can't ISP just use metadata patterns and DPI/analytics to tell what you're up to anyways? For example if I want to hide by torrenting, it's not like VPN is going to really help that. ISP should be able to figure that out right? Or am I wrong here?<p>edit: this is a serious question I am not trying to troll anyone here