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submitted 18 hours ago by Yliaster@lemmy.world to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

Proton VPN/mail. It's often recommended as being safe, but I'm not so sure.

It has servers in Israel. Ties to Israel are never a good thing. Palantir, Epstein, etc are tied to Israel, and Israel also is known for its surveillance. It is also true that it's completely legal there for them to access and monitor any and all information that passes through VPNs or networks there.

I'm looking for a safe alternative that's privacy-conscious and isn't linked to Israel. Both mail and vpn (it's fine if they're separate). Please let me know if you guys know.

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[-] basilisa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Bad news, the sun shines in Israel and provides illegal settlers with vitamin D therefore it must have ties to genocide. BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!!

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 0 points 9 hours ago

BOYCOTT THE SUN!!!

we already are, that's why there's no mass adoption of solar panels and electric vehicles in most of the world despite both being dirt cheap from china and we've doubled down on drilling/extracting fossil fuels to the highest levels ever in history while simultaneously quadrupling our energy usage via datacenters for AI.

[-] basilisa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 6 hours ago

In your stupid country, maybe. Not in mine and the countries that surround it. 

[-] unknowablenight@piefed.social 14 points 12 hours ago

Having exit nodes for their VPN is not the same as collaborating with the government. There is no evidence that the Israeli government has access to any of their information, their servers are hosted in Switzerland.

[-] gtr@programming.dev 1 points 7 hours ago

Ties to Israel are never a good thing.

I think we're on the same page but you might be exaggerating a bit here. Everything is connected in this world.

[-] antifa_ceo@lemmy.ml 38 points 18 hours ago

Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now? Making this jump to liken it to Epstein or Palantir is kinda wild imo

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Having servers in Israel means you are materially tied to them now?

Yes, absolutely. Profiting from servers under genocidal control is literally being materially tied to genocide.

[-] antifa_ceo@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

Like I hear what you're saying. I'm on the fuck Israel train as much as everyone but how does them hosting servers in that region support genocide? Are they giving money to the Israeli government? Defending the IDF?

Like there is McDonald's in Israel does that mean McDonald's is complicit in genocide? (I actually don't know if they give money to support Israel but my point is more broad than that and might be a bad example)

Edit: Also for the McD's example I guess they make money off of Israelis but I still posit that is different to a large degree with being complicit in genocide.

[-] manuallybreathing@lemmy.ml 1 points 7 hours ago

hosting servers in that region support genocide?

yes, it's occupied land, it's not like those servers are in tunnels in Gaza, paying fees to Palestinians

It's the same in many places, and more often than not israel is held up as a special example

[-] FreudianCafe@lemmy.ml 2 points 17 hours ago

Remember me of a guy who said that being paid by the CIA doesnt mean youre actually working for the CIA.

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[-] bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net 5 points 12 hours ago

I would posit that it is actually important to have VPN exit nodes in Israel. The Israelis often try to hide their open evil by posting in Hebrew, adding a hoop to find out they're as monstrous as they are. It's quite possible in the future Hebrew sources will have two versions of everything -- a real internal version talking about being the master race and exterminating all other races, and a sanitized version for foreign IPs. Access to Israeli IPs are the best way to out that when it happens.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 2 points 12 hours ago

aka: the american strategy

[-] doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml 9 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago)

Your ties to Israel claim is more than just a little specious.

Mullvad, widely considered the gold standard for privacy, allows the user to select a server in Israel.

Aside from that nugget, consider not worrying too much about perfect email secrecy. Email isnt private, was never intended to be and has many, many vectors of attack which are so well documented and in such common use that ISPs have attacked email simply to promote end users running their service instead of the competition.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago

One VPN being openly corrupted doesn't make another openly corrupted VPN safe.

[-] doodoo_wizard@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

I can only read this as the first vpn you refer to being mullvad and the second being proton.

It’s hard to understand how you can come to the conclusion that a vpn offering exit nodes (wrong terminology but bear with me) in a bad country makes the vpn service bad.

One of the types of traffic shaping and monitoring that vpns are used to avoid is geofencing, where your ip address is a determinant of how your traffic is treated.

Users who are outside the bad country but want to be treated by its internet as if they are inside would use a vpn server inside the bad country.

Users who are inside the bad country and want to make a connection to the internet outside the bad country without being observed would use a vpn server inside the bad country.

Users whose internet backbone goes through the bad country would be well served by the vpn servers in the bad country.

There are many other situations where a vpn with servers inside a bad country might be useful, but those are just a few.

To put an extremely fine point on what I’m saying: mullvad users in gaza are well served by the single Tel Aviv mullvad server for self evident reasons. They must lean harder than others on mullvads unloggable design, the same one that caused Interpol to have their servers blacklisted until they disallowed port forwarding, but based on the history of that design and law enforcements inability to make hay out of it I think those users are safe.

[-] Danitos@reddthat.com 0 points 7 hours ago

How does having an exit node in Israel equal a VPN being corrupted?

[-] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 18 hours ago

I have my issues with proton because of its CEO and some weird decisions for their product lone and don't use them at all. I.e. I won't defend this company.

Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.

Because of this: my advice is to decouple your privacy concerns and thoughts from politics in the first degree (rhetoric and hearsay). Base it ok policies, observable behavior, audits, laws and so on..your example: exit nodes for VPNs don't have an impact on security at all in neither direction. Hosting infrastructure there would (i.e. it would increase potential access and put the infrastructure under additional legal requirements).

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago

Such a claim without source and explanation or interpretation of assumed implications are pure fear mongering.

It's not some kind of secret that Proton supports genocide. They brag about it.

https://protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers

[-] HorreC@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

I see them saying they are making sure people have access to things that are only allowed from IS IP addresses, outside of that they didnt speak to any political matters. But again saying they make money off these things (which yes they will) is the taint then I would ask you for the VPN service that doesnt have a node there. (and being able to see TV station from the region is good, we can see as outsiders the local and nation news they dont show us as observers).

[-] Concur6053@lemmy.today 15 points 18 hours ago
[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 12 hours ago

Who upvotes this nonsense without searching? It's all over the place.

https://protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers

[-] tyrant@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago
[-] Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Mulvad is the first group that really gets me. Good because they care about the idea, cheap because they aren't trying to choke me for money, and they take cash.

[-] HorreC@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

but doesnt mullvad have an exit node in Isreal too? Wouldnt that just be the same boat this person (OP) put proton in for?

[-] Egonallanon@feddit.uk 14 points 18 hours ago

Do you have information on proton's Israel links? I know they used radware several years ago but no longer do.

[-] anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml 7 points 16 hours ago

There are plenty of problems with Proton, but since they have a VPN service it means they probably have an exit node in Israhell. I'm pretty sure any VPN that masks traffic as coming from Israhell will do the same. I'm not saying that it's not worth looking for one that doesn't do business in Israhell, it just might be hard to find. If you ever need to exit through that node, just make sure your encryption is maxed, with quantum encryption preferably, and avoid doing anything sensitive over that node.

[-] magic_smoke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 15 hours ago

Mullvad or ivpn for vpn, tutanota or posteo for mail.

Also stop looking at advertisements for privacy tools and services.

[-] Shabby4582@lemmy.world 10 points 18 hours ago

You have the ability to whip up this BS about proton, but a web search for “private email provider” was too much?

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Wooosh. That search would be pretty useless to anybody who opposes genocide.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

Not sure why people would downvote this completely reasonable question.

Unfortunately I don't know of any VPN services that actively oppose genocide. I would like to know as well.

It's part of the misery of living in the imperial core. The whole of capitalism is based on genocide, etc.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml -2 points 12 hours ago

Not sure why people would downvote this completely reasonable question.

it goes against the same sort of groupthink that maga and vote-blue-no-matter-who does.

[-] technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

It's kind of amazing how many people are asking for references without doing the bare minimum of searching.

Instead of replying to every dufus in here:

https://protonvpn.com/blog/israel-vpn-servers

Search the rest for yourself.

[-] eldavi@lemmy.ml 1 points 12 hours ago

"we've investigated ourselves and found no wrong doing"

-- proton

this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2026
-34 points (30.7% liked)

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