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Comment by pipermerriam | Hacker News Reader

I use ProtonVPN. Same company as ProtonMail. Highly reputable with a business model around doing privacy and encryption well.

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NordVPN shares offices in Estonia with ProtonVPN. For that reason I find it sketchy.

I would like to read more about this, do you have a source?

I cannot find anything reliable that suggests this! Thanks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...

This suggests the opposite of what you say in your original comment.

https://vpnscam.com/tesonet-data-mining-company-owns-nordvpn...

You should also link the HN thread where proton categorically denies the claims.

In particular, the claim that tesonet controls protonvpn's release signing key.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203

They clearly put a lot of effort in cleaning the mess, as I later discovered myself by being from the same city:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18611863

It seems very likely now, that ProtonMail just decided to use NordVPN's white-label solution to bootstrap its ProtonVPN business:

https://nordvpn.com/white-label/

I was not the original person that replied to you. I was just providing with you with information on the incident they were referring to. Proton denied the claim but it is up to you whether you believe them or not.

Link. Please.

>NordVPN shares offices in Estonia with ProtonVPN

What really? Some proof for that? ProtonVPN and ProtonMail is located in Switzerland Genève, i dont see any open positions for estonia

https://careers.protonmail.com/

I don't think NordVPN is sketchy, even with their latest hic-ups. They are however located in Panama as far as I know, which probably gives the US access for "drug trafficing".

IMHO ProtonVPN (and Mail) are the perfect honeypots

How/why?

ProtonVPN provides the source code for their desktop and mobile clients in their GitHub organization [1]. Yes open source != safe; however this level of transparency is at least a step in the right direction.

They also have regularly been audited by independent organizations that are openly available for the public to see their compliance [2][3][4][5][6].

Do you have any evidence to suggest that they are honeypots?

[1] https://github.com/ProtonVPN

[2] https://protonvpn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Proton...

[3] https://protonvpn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Proton...

[4] https://protonvpn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Proton...

[5] https://protonvpn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Proton...

[6] https://protonvpn.com/blog/open-source/

And how do you know if what they built is exactly what's in that source?

Hehe, exactly, oldest trick in the trade

You seem to not have read my comment. I said open source != safe or trusted.

You can download the entire repository, and self compile yourself after you inspect the code.