A VPN is not an ISP, at least as Canadian law (currently) is concerned. ISPs are required to store IP assignment logs, VPNs are not. Additionally, VPNs (in Canada) cannot be compelled to log users.

Source: Our law firm (I'm from Windscribe), and first hand experience with RCMP.

"OVPN acquired by Pango, parent company of Hotspot Shield: what does it mean for users?"

https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/5/ovpn-acquired-by-pango...

Article updated 2023 https://blog.windscribe.com/the-vpn-relationship-map-2023/

It's only "reasonable" if the subpoena comes from a court in the country the VPN is headquartered in. And just like you said, what LE can get depends on how the VPN is setup. If it's no-logs, anonymous payment, randomly generated user ID's, and servers not allowing dumping of the connections, there isn't much to give to the law at all.

I'm the author of the map and I'll get those updates on there now, the Mozilla node was actually hidden (as I need to update the corp info) and there's other corrections I'm making now.

If you have any other suggestions I'm more than happy to look into them and start getting them updated. This has been a passion project of my own for the past few years so I'm really grateful for any other feedback.

I don't know if it was edited since your comment, but Mozilla VPN is in there (with an arrow pointing to Mullvad)

Contrary to popular belief, IP blocking isn't the most common way VPNs are blocked these days. Additionally, GFW isn't the same in all of China. Different networks, different cities, have different filtering policies and rule sets. Same as in Russia now.

I'm surprised Mullvad works in China. Do you have to use obfuscation software (shadowsocks, etc)? The GFW blocks WireGuard, right?

It is /exactly/ because the media company can promote its partnered VPN. A huge driver of user signups in the commodity personal VPN space is affiliate referrals, and usually those affiliate sites are "review" or "how-to" sites. While the affiliate relationship is usually stated, it implies that the site makes money off the referral. In a lot of cases, the site actually makes its money by preferred placement of the VPN provider on their site. A VPN company often even writes or edits the content for the site.

If you're a VPN company, it's actually cheaper for you to own the sites and populate them with your own product than it is to pay a site for placement, especially if you own four or five VPN brands. Heck, sometimes, they don't even acquire sites. They just start them and spend money to get them to rank well.

I don't trust review sites in general (even if they don't contain paid recommendations, they still rank by which affiliate will net them more money), but I /really/ don't trust sites that cover or rank VPN providers. Personal VPNs as they are pitched to consumers are just shy of snake-oil, and almost all the content written that touts them is revenue driven.

Background: I previously helped start and worked for a VPN provider.

Affiliate campaigns! So basically you'll see in review articles for everything a link with a ton of fluff and tracking in it.

Say you want a new pair of headphones. You'll probably do something like this.

1. Search Google & look for forum/reddit threads talking about specific brands.

2. Look for those brands for further reviews, feedback, and price comparisons.

3. You will come across a review that has links to the "best price".

4. By clicking that link if you purchase that product then, or within 15-30 days (depends on the affiliate agreement) the affiliate will earn commission.

That's why big corps work with media companies. They make hundreds of thousands per month via affiliate commissions alone.

This induces a large amount of biases as media sites always recommend their affiliates over non-affiliates.

VPNmentor, a VPN review site, was acquired by Kape "Technologies" for 150M.

PrivateInternetAccess, a major VPN service was acquired by the same company for 95M.

A VPN review site is worth more than most VPN services it promotes due to insane $CPA they pay to these types of sites, that masquerade as "security exports" while in reality ran by marketing people.

Look at their staff: https://www.vpnmentor.com/about-us/

Every "favorite" VPN is a property they own, except for the sole NordVPN guy.

there isn't that much technical differentiation. If you have a hundred companies selling the same commoditized service the only way for you to make any money is through some sort of brand or customer acquisition. On a pure product case VPN providers have essentially competed each other to the cost of production.

Windscribe is on the map with one connected node: their DNS service Control D. I know it seems a bit hypocritical and untrustworthy since it is written by a VPN company, but Windscribe is generally regarded as trustworthy, privacy oriented, and not deceiving customers for money [0]. Companies such as Windscribe, Mullvad, IVPN, and Proton are better in almost all cases than something like Surfshark because they minimize the risk of your personal info falling into the wrong hands. Unlike those proprietary companies that will turn over your full browsing history in a heartbeat when in court, companies like Windscribe will have nothing to turn over in the first place. I use Windscribe all the time personally because even if sites profile me, I dislike the fact that they can know the city in which I love just from connecting to the site, so there are a few other benefits.

[0] https://windscribe.com/ethics (audits and other general sources over YouTube and privacy forums confirm this)

> I also could not find their name on the map. It doesn't mean that it's not there, I just couldn't find them. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

They're there, in the top-right next to Mullvad, as they're also self-funded. Seemingly connected to "Control D" as it's a DNS service with focus on privacy built by them.

Also, from their "Ethics" page:

> Windscribe is entirely self funded. We don't have any VC's breathing down our necks and telling us what to do.

https://windscribe.com/ethics

> w/o your ISP knowing

I'd be more concerned about everyone else: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com

Top right my guy, with the same treatment as others.

There's 100% a difference between a billion dollar corporate owner vs indies. As well as the amount of spend that goes into affiliate marketing.

IVPN are studs of the industry, no doubt. Very serious folk working hard on sticking to their privacy principles - rare today for sure!

Man, fighting "all or nothing" thinking is a lifelong endeavor.

There are several reasons to have a VPN, and the VPN logging connections is a detriment to some of those.

Reasons include:

* Evading geo-blocking to appear from one country or another

* Evading profiling by websites by laundering your public IP address with others

* Evading privacy invasion by ISPs that most definitely use data for ad/tracking purposes and definitely have logs for law enforcement

* Doing things that could attract interest from law enforcement

The last bullet is the only one affected by logging at the VPN. In this case, the question is which entity do you want to have your traffic? Someone with a reputation for privacy to uphold, or ATT?

Wild guess is most vpn users use that to circumvent geo-blocking of video streaming.

They couldn't care less about logs, they spend their time on instagram, whatsapp, tiktok, discord...

> Aren’t VPNs much less useful unless they’re proven no-log VPN?

That's basically saying that every VPN is "much less useful" as there is no 100% way of proving that it's no-log.

If no-log is a priority, you need Tor, not a VPN.

Your network probably intercepts TLS, are you on a work/school network?

Asks her good sonny boy for help

It depends what you want. The chart doesn't really say which are the best, just which are undisputedly shady.

#1 undisputed champion for security, privacy, and anonymity is almost certainly Mullvad. Note however that Mullvad servers tend to get flagged and blocked by services pretty quickly.

Mozilla VPN (which you can turn on easily in Firefox) is just a thin shell around Mullvad. The ease of use could make it worth it for some people but you'll generally be better off just using Mullvad directly.

Windscribe (the publishers of this list) have their own VPN. I can't speak to how good it is but they of course don't list anything bad about themselves.

ProtonVPN is pretty decent (I can get 150mbps up/down on most servers) especially if you already use their email service. This chart links over to a discussion of some allegations made against Proton by a rival VPN company. The TLDR of that discussion was that those allegations don't really hold any water (which is further influenced by the fact all those allegations now run to dead links).

So my personal experience would lead me to say to use Mullvad if you need to be truly and certainly private & anonymous but to use ProtonVPN if you want to be "safe enough" but also still get access to streaming sites, etc

It depends on what you're doing but the ones in green to the top right are independents but IVACY recently have suffered an issue. If you have issues with the corporate owners you can avoid them by seeing who the parent is and who they own.

"SentinelLabs researchers have discovered that a Chinese APT group known as Bronze Starlight has been signing off malware with a valid certificate. This certificate is used by Ivacy VPN, and the hackers' target is the gambling industry in Southeast Asia."

Honestly, what's your use case?

If I wasn't using https://one.google.com/about/vpn I'd probably set up my own VPN box on AWS.

Always been a fan of the simple suggestion we just Nascar up these folks: https://honestgil.com/nascar

sort of; proper political donations can be looked up https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress

That is a project I would definitely pay to support it!

all paths lead to Kevin Bacon

Hide your DNS queries and SNI from your network admin mom, as you browse pornhub.com

Also, Azerbaijanian Netflix is real hot these days.

Because your ISP is probably selling your browsing history to the highest bidder, and there are a legion of data brokers out there collating every scrap of information they can get their hands on to build profiles about you.

To everyone who shrugs, and says they have nothing to hide, Would you feel comfortable wearing a T shirt in public that went into grim detail about everything you'd rather keep private, are insecure about, or might open you up to discrimination? Would you be willing to wear that to a job interview? To your bank when getting a loan?

A chance for a better route. When I connect directly to Hetzner's storage boxes I generally get about 10 Mbps. When I go through a local VPN I get about ten times that.

In no particular order:

1. To pirate content without getting sent threat letters or being sued

2. To prevent your ISP or the wifi access point or anyone else from seeing which domains you are connecting to and selling that data

3. To prevent government surveillance or blocking

4. To bypass corporate or institutional firewall rules

5. To prevent packet sniffers from snooping on public wifi

6. To prevent your parents, spouse, or relatives from seeing your browsing habbits in router logs

7. To access geo-locked content on streaming services

I usually wireguard through home to keep public wifi from sniffing, as well as so my phone can use my pihole for dns instead of the mobile network's dns.