NordVPN's official response was to get defensive; they proceeded to actually publicly post a screenshot which included the customer's email address. I couldn't believe it.
That tells you all you need to know about NordVPN's terrible attitude towards privacy.
A VPN is inherently not a privacy tool. It is perceived that way because of the acronym Virtual 'Private' Network but privacy is not in the design specs at all.
It's just for tunneling over untrusted networks like Starbucks Wi-Fi and spoofing your geo-location. That's it. You can't verify the no-logs claims by providers unless you're physically in their building and auditing the setup yourself.
EDIT: At the time you were downvoted, I see it's not longer the case. Further comments about Nord and questionable behavior have also been posted in the thread.
Maybe not, but NordVPN and similar services do heavily market themselves as essential privacy tools.
They could claw some information from certain payment providers (like if you used Stripe to top off your account) if they wanted, but you can pay your bill by putting cash in an envelope and mailing it, if you wanted to.
thats good enough for me. I am sick and tired of websites telling me what I can and cannot do based on my location. Its not the 90s anymore, I refuse to put up with geo blocking.
My DNS queries are sent into a private network. Nobody knows what I'm looking at.
When I torrent movies, my IP cannot be tracked. It is shared with many users.
It is fast.
Those are all grest properties I gladly pay for.
We should judge people and companies (which are ultimately also people) not by whether they make mistakes, but by whether they learn from them.