My subrsiption with surfshark is ending soon and I was wondering if there was something better around the same price. There are a lot of ads about many VPNs but a lot of them don’t look so “safe and private” as they want you to think so it’s hard to really figure it out. I don’t want to spend too much since I don’t use them very often but I kinda like the “change catalog of netflix” thing and to be safe while doing some “”“”“”“shady”“”“”" stuff
IIRC free tier on ProtonVPN blocks whatever peer to peer traffic they can detect.
I wouldn’t worry about privacy within the contents of the VPN though, as a lot of their services do require money so they should have quite a lot of funding through the paying users (like me.)
They do what they can to promote as much privacy as possible, but email really doesn’t lend itself well to that just in general. I would always suggest accessing any clearnet site through a VPN or Tor if you do sensitive work online.
I bet it does, I’ll be paying whoever I go with anyway, but the just the existence of the free tier has me wary due to how every single other free VPN works. It may be that this one subsidizes the free tier with the paid or treats it as a loss leader, but “free VPN” is always sketchy without knowing that for sure, which I do not.
Regardless of monetary incentive or lack thereof, privacy remains a concern. If I were not concerned about privacy, why even use a VPN? Unfortunately, torrenting harms the Tor network, so it is not really a good alternative either.
Email isn’t private, sure, but that doesn’t mean that your email provider needs to snitch on you to the Feds either. I’m not wary of proton because “email isn’t private,” I’m wary of proton because “they directly complied with law enforcement’s request to turn in an activist.” Not that I want that in an email provider itself but I have a VPN. However, if they’re also my VPN provider then they have my real IP. Rn, proton only has me from Mullvad and farther back from Nord, they don’t know my IP to turn me in, but if I buy their VPN service, that changes, then they know everything.
Honestly I might just look into hosting myself a VPN on a VPS.
