Proton VPN/mail. It’s often recommended as being safe, but I’m not so sure.
It has servers in Israel. Ties to Israel are never a good thing. Palantir, Epstein, etc are tied to Israel, and Israel also is known for its surveillance. It is also true that it’s completely legal there for them to access and monitor any and all information that passes through VPNs or networks there.
I’m looking for a safe alternative that’s privacy-conscious and isn’t linked to Israel. Both mail and vpn (it’s fine if they’re separate). Please let me know if you guys know.
Complete bullshit by a trolling OP. Israel is cancer, but OP is doing an obvious smear on Proton to try to agitate leftists. Case in point: Mullvad and most other VPNs have exit nodes in Israel.
It is a dumbfuck corporate decision that has absolutely no more bearing on your VPN’s privacy than routing through the US or Australia. You are truly completely confused.
Also “its” doesn’t have an apostrophe when used ad a possessive, you fucking idiot.
Do you use a CPU?
I hate to break it to you buddy…
Unideal? Yes
Does that mean I stop trying altogether to minimize surveillance? No.
Having exit nodes for their VPN is not the same as collaborating with the government. There is no evidence that the Israeli government has access to any of their information, their servers are hosted in Switzerland.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t running a VPN to a region require you to have a server in that region?
Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now? Making this jump to liken it to Epstein or Palantir is kinda wild imo
Doing any business with or in Israel is being materially tied to Israel.
They don’t need to be materially linked; they are digitally linked. Israel allows it’s communication and intelligence agencies complete legal access to any communications through VPNs that operate in it’s area.
I don’t want that surveillance.
Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now?
Yes, absolutely. Profiting from servers under genocidal control is literally being materially tied to genocide.
Like I hear what you’re saying. I’m on the fuck Israel train as much as everyone but how does them hosting servers in that region support genocide? Are they giving money to the Israeli government? Defending the IDF?
Like there is McDonald’s in Israel does that mean McDonald’s is complicit in genocide? (I actually don’t know if they give money to support Israel but my point is more broad than that and might be a bad example)
Edit: Also for the McD’s example I guess they make money off of Israelis but I still posit that is different to a large degree with being complicit in genocide.
Fuck McDonald’s too tbh
It’s not about supporting genocide that I’m concerned about over here per se (though it’s obviously not a good look), it’s the fact that the region is known for surveillance through any comms that enter it.
Unrelated, but yes, people against genocide literally boycott any businesses that operate in Israel, including McDonalds. BDS movement, for example.
hosting servers in that region support genocide?
yes, it’s occupied land, it’s not like those servers are in tunnels in Gaza, paying fees to Palestinians
It’s the same in many places, and more often than not israel is held up as a special example
Remember me of a guy who said that being paid by the CIA doesnt mean youre actually working for the CIA.
Would you buy a volkswagen in the 1940s?
Could you explain why this is the same?
In one case you have a company tied to a nazi regime, in the other case you have a company tied to a nazi regime. Hope this helps
Proton has servers in 127 countries, including Cuba, Russia, Venezuela… do they all count as ties?
You’re here comparing Venezuela and Cuba to nazis, get out you pig
I’m here saying Proton has servers in 127 countries and they are widely different, so how do you decide to which ones they are “tied” (protip: They are tied to none, getting an exit node in a country benefit users from the countries next to it, and it also opens that country’s geolocked content to the world). Get a brain.
Yes, but afaik they are not nazis nor are involved in the kind of genocidal actions israel is
Proton has servers in both Russia and Ukraine, and neither means Proton has ties with their governments. If you want to expand an Israel boycott to anyone doing business with any company from Israel then ok, but the word “ties” seems to imply some involvement or complicity with a government/regime/ideology, like they are connected to anything said place is doing.
Removed by mod
Sure bro, the country that ended nazi germany is actually nazi.
You sir have made my day. Thank you.
Bad news, the sun shines in Israel and provides illegal settlers with vitamin D therefore it must have ties to genocide. BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!
It’s not about genocide.
It’s about surveillance, which is fully legal in Israel.
There are other regions that don’t conduct surveillance of all VPNs and comms. That’s better.
BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!
we already are, that’s why there’s no mass adoption of solar panels and electric vehicles in most of the world despite both being dirt cheap from china and we’ve doubled down on drilling/extracting fossil fuels to the highest levels ever in history while simultaneously quadrupling our energy usage via datacenters for AI.
In your stupid country, maybe. Not in mine and the countries that surround it.
I have my issues with proton because of its CEO and some weird decisions for their product lone and don’t use them at all. I.e. I won’t defend this company.
Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.
Because of this: my advice is to decouple your privacy concerns and thoughts from politics in the first degree (rhetoric and hearsay). Base it ok policies, observable behavior, audits, laws and so on…your example: exit nodes for VPNs don’t have an impact on security at all in neither direction. Hosting infrastructure there would (i.e. it would increase potential access and put the infrastructure under additional legal requirements).
The observable behavior is the fact that Israel allows it’s communication and intelligence agencies complete legal access to access and monitor any info out of VPNs and other digital social info/comms.
That’s been sourced; Israel is known for its surveillance. I’m not sure why that’s so controversial.
This isn’t fear-mongering, this isn’t assumption.
Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.
It’s not some kind of secret that Proton supports genocide. They brag about it.
I see them saying they are making sure people have access to things that are only allowed from IS IP addresses, outside of that they didnt speak to any political matters. But again saying they make money off these things (which yes they will) is the taint then I would ask you for the VPN service that doesnt have a node there. (and being able to see TV station from the region is good, we can see as outsiders the local and nation news they dont show us as observers).
I would posit that it is actually important to have VPN exit nodes in Israel. The Israelis often try to hide their open evil by posting in Hebrew, adding a hoop to find out they’re as monstrous as they are. It’s quite possible in the future Hebrew sources will have two versions of everything – a real internal version talking about being the master race and exterminating all other races, and a sanitized version for foreign IPs. Access to Israeli IPs are the best way to out that when it happens.
aka: the american strategy
Do you have information on proton’s Israel links? I know they used radware several years ago but no longer do.
If you open the app Israel is literally listed as a server. It’s not hard to find.
That’s it? they’ve got some metal hosted in the country somewhere? I was expecting more.
Looking through the thread it seems you’re very keen on the end of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people and privacy which is good but going after proton won’t help on either front here.
If you want to help stop the murder look into the BDS and the organisations they’re currently running boyoctts against and focus your efforts on those as those organisations are the ones propping up the Israeli state and allowing/assisting it to commit it’s crimes. community action against targets that matter will have a far more meaningful effects than going after a handful of servers. To this end also look up Palestinian organisations where you live to work with. The Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK is good example.
And on the privacy side I feel you seem to miss the point of how VPNs work. If you avoid ever setting your exit point to Israel then Israel will never see your traffic and be able to surveil it. Unless you have some evidence that Proton’s network has been compromised I can’t see any technical reason to avoid using Proton or any other provider running endpoints in Israel.
I’m a big fan of mullvad
I think mullvad has a server in Israel too
Mulvad is the first group that really gets me. Good because they care about the idea, cheap because they aren’t trying to choke me for money, and they take cash.
but doesnt mullvad have an exit node in Isreal too? Wouldnt that just be the same boat this person (OP) put proton in for?
Source?
Your ties to Israel claim is more than just a little specious.
Mullvad, widely considered the gold standard for privacy, allows the user to select a server in Israel.
Aside from that nugget, consider not worrying too much about perfect email secrecy. Email isnt private, was never intended to be and has many, many vectors of attack which are so well documented and in such common use that ISPs have attacked email simply to promote end users running their service instead of the competition.
Mullvad doing something — even if it’s reknown — doesn’t automatically make it’s actions good.
Israel conducts surveillance of any VPN communications of any that exist in the region. This is fully legal there. This is a threat to privacy. You’d need to let me know how that isn’t the case, not that X or Y company also hosts a server in the region.
Re: mail, not looking for perfect, just better than Gmail, ideally FOSS.
One VPN being openly corrupted doesn’t make another openly corrupted VPN safe.
I can only read this as the first vpn you refer to being mullvad and the second being proton.
It’s hard to understand how you can come to the conclusion that a vpn offering exit nodes (wrong terminology but bear with me) in a bad country makes the vpn service bad.
One of the types of traffic shaping and monitoring that vpns are used to avoid is geofencing, where your ip address is a determinant of how your traffic is treated.
Users who are outside the bad country but want to be treated by its internet as if they are inside would use a vpn server inside the bad country.
Users who are inside the bad country and want to make a connection to the internet outside the bad country without being observed would use a vpn server inside the bad country.
Users whose internet backbone goes through the bad country would be well served by the vpn servers in the bad country.
There are many other situations where a vpn with servers inside a bad country might be useful, but those are just a few.
To put an extremely fine point on what I’m saying: mullvad users in gaza are well served by the single Tel Aviv mullvad server for self evident reasons. They must lean harder than others on mullvads unloggable design, the same one that caused Interpol to have their servers blacklisted until they disallowed port forwarding, but based on the history of that design and law enforcements inability to make hay out of it I think those users are safe.
It’s not operating in a bad country that makes the vpn bad, but the fact that the country is known for its surveillance of VPNs there that makes it bad.
How does having an exit node in Israel equal a VPN being corrupted?
You have the ability to whip up this BS about proton, but a web search for “private email provider” was too much?
Why is it BS?
I did my research, I wanted community feedback for things I may have missed.
Wooosh. That search would be pretty useless to anybody who opposes genocide.
Mullvad or ivpn for vpn, tutanota or posteo for mail.
Also stop looking at advertisements for privacy tools and services.
Mullvad has Israeli servers.
Thanks for the other reccs though!
Ties to Israel are never a good thing.
I think we’re on the same page but you might be exaggerating a bit here. Everything is connected in this world.
Let’s be more specific.
Anything that gives money, power, or influence to Israel is never a good thing. They need to be boycotted at all levels.
Then why boycott anything. Why use privacy-conscious alternatives. Everything is connected, afterall.
You can at least try to minimize the information that they squeeze out of you. It’s either that you can give least amount of information such as just device you use, or whether you use Google or not, etc. or you could let them know every single detail in your life, everything you do, everywhere you go, even everything you think. That’s what this community is about. It’s not about being an alien to the world but minimizing the invasion of our privacy as much as is possible.
And many people do actually boycott everything, they quit all electronic devices and live the old school way, away from highly urbanized or metropolitan areas. If that’s what you want, be a hermit like them.
There are plenty of problems with Proton, but since they have a VPN service it means they probably have an exit node in Israhell. I’m pretty sure any VPN that masks traffic as coming from Israhell will do the same. I’m not saying that it’s not worth looking for one that doesn’t do business in Israhell, it just might be hard to find. If you ever need to exit through that node, just make sure your encryption is maxed, with quantum encryption preferably, and avoid doing anything sensitive over that node.
