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Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

obscura.net

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Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#51
post #43

What happened if some government agency were to order both Obscura and Mullvad to log a certain user or certain activities? Wouldn't it be possible to combine those logs? If it isn't: would that change if Obscura was ordered to also use a separate Mullvad account for a specific user/IP?

Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.

Thanks for pointing this out. I wasn't aware of NetFlow. I don't use IVPN, but I found this writeup informative:

https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/isp-netflow-surveillance...

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#55
post #43

What happened if some government agency were to order both Obscura and Mullvad to log a certain user or certain activities? Wouldn't it be possible to combine those logs? If it isn't: would that change if Obscura was ordered to also use a separate Mullvad account for a specific user/IP?

Governments do not even need any of the providers to comply, they can access global NetFlow data. This is conveniently not discussed by any commercial VPN provider.

How would such an attack work?

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mullvad is near the cutting edge on zero trust deployments; allowing user traffic to pass thru, with guaranteed no logging, assumption of compromise guiding system architecture, etc. Nobody can withstand a nation state, not even other nation states, so I feel like they're doing the best that can be reasonably expected of them

> Mullvad is near the cutting edge on zero trust deployments What is "zero trust deployments"?

Meaning they're achieving their privacy goals without any inherent trust in their systems (eg no databases of user info, etc)

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#57
post #52

Just to note here - with Mullvad you can pay via gift card that you can find at various retailers (to get a one-time code that you can use to create an account). Of course they can see your IP address but there is no payment/contact information on the system.

You can mail them cash too

Re: Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise

#60
post #58

It would have been nice if they'd have revealed what the payment options are before the final step. Kind of disappointing.

(Carl from Obscura here)

Ah we added payment and pricing to our navbar in staging but forgot to push to prod. Doing so now!

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