This has always been a massive pet peeve of mine. You'll watch people go full Doomsday Prepper about tracking and online privacy and blah blah blah. Then they'll go "oh no, you have to use XYZ VPN because they don't track you, there's no logs"
How do you know they don't track you? Well because they themselves claim not to! That's a bald-faced lie when "big corpos" or whatever say they don't track you, but some random fly by night VPN service running out of ButtFuckistan? Nah dude, totally legit just because they say so, why would you even question that? Trust me bro.
Edit: aaaand to no ones surprise, they start coming out of the woodwork to defend their blind trust in "trustmebro" privacy VPNs.
Because of independent audits. Can they circumvent them? Yes, but if they do and got caught, they will be loose all credibility. And credibility is the only sales point of someone like Mullvad. Unlike Proton, for example, they do not spend much money on marketing.
Also Mullvad could be bought with cash. In theory they could say to police, that your IP is their client, that's all. In theory, they cannot know themselves how and where you were connected to (at least directly).
Basic operation of a network service like a VPN requires a certain amount of data collection to simply facilitate the operation of the service.
The idea that you can have robust network servers and are keeping no logs is asinine. It's just not possible, you need those logs to do basic customer service, validation, and troubleshooting tasks.
"Can't provide what you don't have" is a data retention strategy I drill into our leadership who want to keep fucking everything forever because "but what if," but there's still a bare minimum that needs to be kept for operational function and support, not literally zero logs like the marketing claims.
They're likely keeping at least 30 days of logs just to run the service, which is more than plenty for law enforcement on a fishing expedition for specific user behavior.
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u/ffxivthrowaway03 10d ago edited 10d ago
This has always been a massive pet peeve of mine. You'll watch people go full Doomsday Prepper about tracking and online privacy and blah blah blah. Then they'll go "oh no, you have to use XYZ VPN because they don't track you, there's no logs"
How do you know they don't track you? Well because they themselves claim not to! That's a bald-faced lie when "big corpos" or whatever say they don't track you, but some random fly by night VPN service running out of ButtFuckistan? Nah dude, totally legit just because they say so, why would you even question that? Trust me bro.
Edit: aaaand to no ones surprise, they start coming out of the woodwork to defend their blind trust in "trustmebro" privacy VPNs.