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This is PR and the comments are astroturfed to absolute hell. VPN is the most heavily advertised business I am aware of. There are a lot of reasons to mistrust
by ouid 4y ago
This is PR and the comments are astroturfed to absolute hell. VPN is the most heavily advertised business I am aware of. There are a lot of reasons to mistrust this behavior.
1) it doesn't cost mullvad very much to not autorenew subscriptions. People dont forget to renew their subscriptions to a service that breaks your connection to youtube when you forget to pay. It's closer to the world of warcraft model.
2) Customers are now rightfully wary of renewing subscriptions. Given horror stories of how difficult it is to cancel your subscription to a service, I suspect that you lose upwards of 50% of potential customers if you only offer subscription models.
3) No VPN has any incentive at all to "protect your privacy". It is perfectly legal for them to lie to you about not keeping logs and then turn them over to state actors, provided they are operating out of the right state. In fact, state actors would encourage such a thing. Perhaps some of these VPNs do something to protect your privacy, but it is not because they are incentivized to.
- colonwqbang 4y agoIn which state is it legal to lie about the service you are delivering? I.e. in your marketing say that you will deliver something and then instead deliver something less valuable.
- ouid 4y agoIts possible you dont know what state means. But the US has plenty of mass warrants that require companies to keep logs even in the presence of promises that they dont. In fact, they are obligated not to reveal that they are now keeping logs. Warrants supercede contract.
- exyi 4y agoMullvad is based in Sweden, they seem to be privacy friendlier in general (even allowing sites like sci-hub on their TLD)
- colonwqbang 4y agoEven in the US I think you can't advertise a service that you are not legally allowed to provide. Does the first warrant make you immune to fraud allegations? I'm not an expert and am ready to accept that I may be wrong. If you know any sources on the matter, it would be interesting to read.
- sixhobbits 4y ago"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "
- ouid 4y agoi flagged the post, but VPNs are not "unlikely" sources of astroturfing. I do not particularly trust the startup incubator that launched many of these VPNs to take a particularly critical view of astroturfing, so i have chosen to ignore this forum rule
- throwaway287391 4y ago> it doesn't cost mullvad very much to not autorenew subscriptions. People dont forget to renew their subscriptions to a service that breaks your connection to youtube when you forget to pay. It's closer to the world of warcraft model. I might be in a tiny minority of users (genuinely not sure) but I only enable my VPN when I want to get around IP geolocation (e.g. to stream something only available in another country) and otherwise turn it off when I'm done to minimize latency. I sometimes go a week or two without using it so I could easily not notice at least for days if my subscription didn't autorenew.
- k8sToGo 4y agoYou forgot the last conspiracy reason which I always read in comments like this: 4) It is probably state funded and run by the CIA.
- ouid 4y agothis is a weird double standard. The only reason to use a vpn is because of fears of the CIA or whatever in the first place.