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Comment by aurbano | Hacker News Reader

I've recently switched to Mullvad from PIA, mainly because it's not US based and they "sound" more privacy focused.

I quote sound because as another commenter mentioned, without trusted third party audits it's all marketing...

The US has some of the laxest data retention and filtering laws in the world. Especially compared to most European countries. Mullvad is based in Sweden which has much more strict data retention and filtering requirements for ISPs than in the US and the government has already expressed a desire to expand these to VPN providers.

And as the Snowden leaks have shown being located outside the US is not even a speed bump to the NSA being able to access your communications.

I understand your point, but I believe in this case it doesn't apply necessarily because Sweden/Europe are only concerned with privacy related data.

Mullvad gets around this by not storing customer information. As others have pointed out, your "account" is just a long number. You top it up any way you want (including sending cash in an envelope if you are truly paranoid).

So I do believe that it stands a better chance of being fully anonymous & private than a US counterpart.

Mullvad has gateways in the US. Does this help?

But Mullvad is not an ISP.

Mullvad allows for cash in mail payment. They also don't really have accounts in the traditional sense. Just a long account number that is associated with the payments. Really ticks all the boxes for me.

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