Someone mentioned—correctly, I would imagine—that TikTok getting banned will/would drive sales/use of VPNs.

I realize there's been some news regarding one of the companies I'm about to mention, and I'm ignoring that for the sake of this post.

I highly recommend both Proton VPN and Mullvad. I have a paid subscription to both and I always will.

I run Proton on my router and Mullvad on my computer. The reason why applies in theory to any two VPNs that are not owned by the same parent company. In my case, Proton can see my actual IP address, and so they're aware of where my traffic is actually coming from. They are not, however, aware of the content of my traffic, because it's still encrypted by Mullvad. Contrariwise, Mullvad can see everything I'm doing, but they have no idea where any of it's actually coming from, because my connection to their server is from the Proton server that talks to my router. Unless there's something I'm unaware of, I'm as certain as anyone in my shoes reasonably can be, that both Proton and Mullvad are completely honest when they say that none of their VPN servers keep logs. If either of them are lying about that, I would be shocked. Let's just say for argument's sake, though, that the opposite is true instead, meaning that everything I do is being logged by both of them. Again: Proton knows where it's coming from but not what it is; Mullvad knows what it is but not where it's coming from. Unless I'm not understanding something, this would make historical analysis of both logs insufficient to correlate my traffic.

As a wannabe privacy advocate, I react negatively whenever anything that's not inherently illegal in my country nor should it be gets banned, just on principle. Having said that: if you're worried about the ban, don't buy a VPN to get around it. Buy two, along with a router specifically designed to run OpenWrt, and uninstall TikTok.

Thank you.

#VPN #TikTok #privacy #privacyMatters #infosec #security #uspol