Proton has ties to Israel. What's a safe alternative?
from Yliaster@lemmy.world to privacy@lemmy.ml on 20 Feb 12:05
https://lemmy.world/post/43367909
from Yliaster@lemmy.world to privacy@lemmy.ml on 20 Feb 12:05
https://lemmy.world/post/43367909
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.
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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
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
You sir have made my day. Thank you.
Proton has servers in 127 countries, including Cuba, Russia, Venezuela… do they all count as ties?
Yes, but afaik they are not nazis nor are involved in the kind of genocidal actions israel is
.
Sure bro, the country that ended nazi germany is actually nazi.
USSR helped end Nazi Germany but nice revisionism lmao 🤡 Current day russia is 100% fash
Helped? Helped who actually? Who was the main combatent that was helped?
Yeahh I am not gonna participate in your little revisionist spiel, you can be delulu all on your own buddy.
Thanks, i was already getting dumber from this conversation
Regardless of your opinion of 1940s Russia, don’t you think countries change over time?
Everything can change. But i dont think (and im totally open to changing my mind upon seeing arguments) russia became nazi. People who say this usually look at fascism from a moral, not a scientific point of view
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.
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.
Remember me of a guy who said that being paid by the CIA doesnt mean youre actually working for the CIA.
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.
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
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.
Fuck McDonald’s too tbh
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.
Doing any business with or in Israel is being materially tied to Israel.
Do you have information on proton’s Israel links? I know they used radware several years ago but no longer do.
protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers
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.
The focus on this post was primarily the surveillance and lack of privacy Israel is known for, though genocide is obviously not a good look either. Relating themselves to Israel in anyway does lower the company’s reputation and the trust it inspires.
I am admittedly not tech-savvy so I’m not really able to understand the fine print myself, though if they conducted their operations within israel that’d definitely be alarming from a surveillance pov. I’m not sure it would register as merely “some metal” to me, if that were the case.
However I know they’re in Switzerland and I don’t have any idea how “exit Nodes” and the sort function.
Source?
Who upvotes this nonsense without searching? It’s all over the place.
protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers
It’s always good to ask for a source so everyone is on the same page.
Anyone who gets upset when a source is asked for is a moron.
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).
It’s not some kind of secret that Proton supports genocide. They brag about it.
protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers
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).
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.
You have the ability to whip up this BS about proton, but a web search for “private email provider” was too much?
Wooosh. That search would be pretty useless to anybody who opposes genocide.
Why is it BS?
I did my research, I wanted community feedback for things I may have missed.
I’m a big fan of mullvad
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?
I think mullvad has a server in Israel too
I don’t think having a server somewhere is necessarily a bad thing. If you choose to use that server it’s up to you.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I’m afraid I may have not been clear enough.
There are solid reasons for operating vpn servers in Israel other than simply paying for the privilege of being allowed to let unit 8200 in to your system.
Those reasons, the privacy and restriction bypassing power the VPNs customers pay for, must be measured against the danger of releasing their customers data to the country in which the server is hosted.
At the same time, it requires a higher degree of trust than even what you would normally expect from a vpn provider.
In a situation like this where there are (someone like me might say noble) reasons for dipping one’s corporate sack into that bubbling crucible, we have to trust that the corporate sack has an industrial grade asbestos athletic protector covering it.
As I said above, there is good reason to believe that is the case. Mullvads proclaimed no logging system was so resilient that Interpol (who I need to be clear are not the clouseau esque bumblers of media, but a powerful and far reaching law enforcement agency) had to settle for calling in the major cdns to blacklist mullvads servers instead of succeeding at any of their lawful searches and attempts to log traffic across a broad and compliant jurisdiction.
The result of their pressure on the cdns was that the cdns did blacklist mullvad and mullvad, rather than comply with the search, simply discontinued the port forwarding feature that law enforcement claimed was key to the investigation.
The investigation was concerning cp trading over windows cifs (the right click share) with forwarded ports. Having seen several write ups on how it was being used, and having used forwarded ports with cifs to make a fake vpn between two office buildings, mullvad was the only real security layer in that operation.
Mullvad chose to discontinue what I truly believe was their most loved feature over letting the cops in on principle. They were put in the position of being able to make that choice because their system stood up to lawful attempts to confiscate and bug it.
It is clear to me that mullvad seems to be trustworthy and has a resilient system. If anyone can safely host a vpn server in Israel it’s them.
Because we can establish reasonable trust in one organization to do something, it’s reasonable to recognize that another might also be able to do something. There are a host of comparisons to be made between the two organizations, but the point of by replies was to establish that the simple fact of a vpn server in Israel doesn’t imply endorsement of, compliance with or a danger to the users of that service or server.
To summarize, are you saying your trust in Mullvad’s ability to safely host in Israel comes from its decision to relinquish prized features to resist interpol searches?
That’s definitely not what I meant to write. In the words of our number one drone striker, uhh, let me be clear:
It’s much easier to believe that the Interpol was unable to successfully monitor or infiltrate mullvads servers even with warrants in multiple nations and instead took the alternate route of applying pressure to cdns and ISPs to blacklist the service as opposed to any other understanding because it’s much harder to convince everyone who handles packets globally to stop communicating with a set of IPs than it is to execute a search warrant that you have legal authorization and the specialized training and personnel for.
My interpretation of the reason that mullvad discontinuing port forwarding was acceptable to Interpol was that it would drive the people under investigation to either conduct their business under more compliant services or out in the open.
To directly address your concerns for your own choice of vpn:
If you’re worried about having your own data turned over to Israel, you can’t just rely on the physical location of servers to prevent that. The service you use needs to be trustworthy on its own because many nations comply with Israeli intelligence as a matter of course or as a matter of law. You may be well served by layering security instead of relying on just one service or connection in that case.
If your concern is not paying for a service that will eventually send that money to Israeli businesses or even to the government of that nation directly, that’s a toughie. Either because the region contains many motivated customers or because some VPNs are intelligence cutouts, a lot of VPNs have a server in Israel. Of the ones I use, airvpn doesn’t have any Israeli servers. I havent paid much attention to news about air and do not use it for sensitive communications. I do not recommend anyone use air for sensitive communications.
The concern is primarily about not letting Israel have my data; payments towards them isn’t. What would you recommend in terms of layering security? I am currently degoogling, getting rid of Meta apps, and switching from american for-profit socials to FOSS alternatives.
How does having an exit node in Israel equal a VPN being corrupted?
Government backdoors / clauses. Microsoft has many tied to the entity.
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.
I apologize for not being clearer. Even in my relative youth and ignorance I make broad assumptions about others understanding of the recent histoy of VPNs and omit stuff I think is simply known because naturally everyone who would post on the privacy board has been keeping up with privacy and security news for the last decade.
I made another reply that explains in detail why and how mullvad can be trusted in this situation. Hopefully it’s a little less scattered, but I can clarify anything that seems wrong or weird.
The point I was trying to make about mail was that you’re better off treating it as a postcard that anyone can read than seeking a privacy respecting service. That simple change will improve your posture because you will no longer be communicating private matters in a medium that isn’t private.
I’ve only recently started looking into privacy so much of it goes over my head.
I don’t use mails for communication, but I’d just like to limit the amount of information/tracking that corporate overlords can collect of me if I can help it (subscriptions mostly and the demographic information they imply, I suppose).
In that case just using any email service that doesn’t do ad tracking is probably fine. Make sure to keep your email deleted up and save anything you need to know or might need later on down the line.
Try to pick a service that’s a big name, lots of recipients servers and clients will enforce very strict uhh dkim or whatever and that means small timers get bounced.
It’s kind of amazing how many people are asking for references without doing the bare minimum of searching.
Instead of replying to every dufus in here:
protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers
Search the rest for yourself.
“we’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing”
– proton
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?
I wouldn’t assume they aren’t able to grab it all. Both the US and all 5 eye countries, and Israel, should be avoided if possible, to have nothing passing through their servers. Not that other countries won’t also grab it as they can, but Israel by extension of the US has things compromised on a base level.
Not sure why people would downvote this completely reasonable question.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any VPN services that actively oppose genocide. I would like to know as well.
It’s part of the misery of living in the imperial core. The whole of capitalism is based on genocide, etc.
it goes against the same sort of groupthink that maga and vote-blue-no-matter-who does.
Thank you. I’m baffled by how complacent people are to Israel’s involvement.
They don’t necessarily need to oppose the genocide but just not host any servers in the area (since that means they’ve access to it).
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
Bad news, the sun shines in Israel and provides illegal settlers with vitamin D therefore it must have ties to genocide. 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.
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.
I think we’re on the same page but you might be exaggerating a bit here. Everything is connected in this world.
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.
Yeah that is what I meant, I’m guessing you meant to reply to the other guy, not me?
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.
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.
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 as a possessive, you fucking idiot.
Just because mullvad and most other VPNs do something, doesn’t mean it’s good.
Israel is known for a level of surveillance that most other countries aren’t.
The rest of what you’ve said is just ad hominem I’m not interested in.
Proton is garbage though. They immediately disabled my account after I set it up, as I’m on some blacklist by some brazillian firm, they didn’t tell me that part, they said suspicious activity. I do nothing illegal, or spammy either, I read the news and use some social media.
Anyway they gave me no way to appeal. The other main one that doesn’t require a phone number or existing email let me appeal and approved it.
Now why am I on some shady blacklist that tech companies use to discriminate against people for? I can only speculate, but I suspect it’s an Israel thing.