No one seems to be talking about this situation going on but it's going on.
I've used VPNs for about a decade now for all my browsing both on my phone and home computer. The amount of counter measures I've seen against VPNs in the last year has grown astronomically. It has quite obviously become a target by big tech companies and government but instead of banning VPNs, it appears the strategy they're going for is to make them so unwieldy to use that people voluntarily stop using them or just don't start. It's coercion, similar to what we saw during COVID to force vaccines.
5 years ago, you could access the whole internet with a VPN without issues. Now, every website you go to it seems wants you to confirm you're human which can take a few seconds or a few minutes depending (significantly interrupting your browsing experience). Furthermore, many websites straight up don't even work with a VPN either.
The Judeo-Establishment will tell you this is needed to stop hackers and bots but this isn't true at all because sophisticated hacker/scamming groups have so many other ways to secure themselves. It's only the average person in the public who is being harmed which means they're the true targets. The government wants everyone's data and they aren't going to let VPNs stop them.
We should honestly make it a law for any organization to discriminate against connections from people using a VPN and those who aren't.
Proton is no good, even?
i remember a while back, they (proton) did produce some logs or data after being pressured by court order (if anyone remembers, or can correct me on this please do)
they require account creation with a username and password, plus they appear to have a growing ecosystem of services that might kinda become a walled garden. so if you were to become dependent on a lot of their services, you have more to lose
i started on nordvpn and they became like this, and i prefer as little identifying information as possible. and as little dependency as possible. i like mullvad because it's simply just the vpn app and nothing else
far as i know, mullvad has been proven to not keep any logs when they were investigated, and any payment information they receive is destroyed after like a week or so. the only persistent detail that one needs is the unique identifcation number which is randomly generated that you need to log in to use the service. so if you forget that number you can just generate a new one, and since there's no ecosystem, nothing really is at risk of being lost.
that's my thoughts on it.
Thank you for the detailed answer, I appreciate it!
I have been considering jumping ship from Nord and was considering Proton. I will give Mullvad a look as well!
I got a bit curious and had a look around for about 15mins. Interesting thing I noticed if it's of any value to you -- when you look up "best vpns" or "top rated vpns" on mainstream tech review sites and such, mullvad is hardly mentioned. It's usually nordvpn, surfshark, proton, express, ivpn, etc.
I noticed mullvad is only really talked about in comments like here, on twitter comments, YouTube comments, etc. Or if there is a truly privacy-conscious youtuber/website they might have a video/article about mullvad too. But you have to deliberately be searching up mullvad