Nord had a very bad incident a few years ago techcrunch.com/…/nordvpn-confirms-it-was-hacked/
They were also REALLY late to the disclosure and tried to play it off as “them being responsible”:
NordVPN said it found out about the breach a “few months ago,” but the spokesperson said the breach was not disclosed until today because the company wanted to be “100% sure that each component within our infrastructure is secure.”
They’re also very aggressive about advertising… Which is typically the opposite of what you want.
Proton has had write ups in the past about the VPN review market as well and how a lot of reviews are “whoever pays us the most money is the top VPN.” Proton has a strong enough track record in their other software for doing the right thing and truly valuing security, privacy, and open standards, so I’m inclined to believe them. VPN was one of the first spinoff products they launched when it was still mail, and they did so because some of their more sensitive customers (think journalists in some bad parts of the world) were having to rely on third party VPNs of questionable integrity.
I trust Mullvad and Proton at this point for VPNs, nobody else.
Alk@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Personally I don’t trust companies who aggressively advertise like they do, but that’s not a real reason grounded in evidence. It just tends to be correct. I recommend Mullvad.
randomname01@feddit.nl 8 months ago
They advertise aggressively because running a VPN is ridiculously profitable. I do agree with your apprehensive feeling, but at the same time their advertisements do make sense.
Socsa@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Right,but their YouTube ads also contain a bunch of misleading statements and outright lies about streaming services, privacy and military grade encryption.
WhatsThePoint@lemmy.world 8 months ago
They didn’t aggressively advertise when I first started using them like 6 years ago. I have yet to see evidence of their no-log policy being broken but it’s hard to trust most companies these days.
WamGams@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
I feel like 6 years ago was the height of their marketing. Literally every podcast I listened to had them as a sponsor and maybe half of the YouTube sponsorships were Nord.
It is because of them most people probably now know what a VPN is, but I feel like their marketing budget is a hundred fold smaller than it used to be.