I've been using mullvad for a few years—since PIA got bought out—and would recommend it if you're concerned about trust.
So, using a VPN doesn't actually eliminate all possibility of being tracked. All you're doing is replacing who can potentially see all of your data, from your ISP to the VPN provider, so trust is actually a pretty important factor.
When I switched the consensus at the time was that mullvad was the most true to its privacy statement, i.e. trustworthy. A lot of other vpns are cheaper or have more bells and whistles, but have histories of data breaches or scandals, are based in countries with weak privacy/strong surveillance laws, or are owned by companies that may have an interest in the customers data (like with the PIA acquisition I mentioned).
Mullvad too has had a few incidents where they were served court orders to provide data to the police, but iirc no data was ever actually given up. Plus, they allow a bunch of different privacy-centric payment methods, including just sending cash in an envelope.
I'd recommend taking a look at some more recent discussions comparing VPNs but I think considering mullvad is a good place to start.
For what it's worth, I opted to wait until I had my first issue with PIA after the buyout to switch and it just never really happened. I've remained on PIA for my sea-sailing needs, and still haven't had an ISP email or other problem with them, other than the client being a little janky on occasion.
I'm not an active advocate or anything, but my experience is that they're still good enough, even years after the acquisition. Perhaps they're using the data for something behind the scenes, but it's cheap and keeps my ISP off my back. I'd at least still consider it in the "good enough for this purpose" category.
I’ll admit, this spooked me, but for different reasons than the OP and most comments.
I didn’t recognize any of the downloads, even though I have a publicly routable static IP and don’t use a VPN (I have a domain and self host so I know my IP hast changed in years).
I use exclusively private trackers, and nothing I’ve actually downloaded showed up, and the things that did were sporadic—one every couple days or so, first/last seen times identical, random torrents. I started asking myself if I had a rogue device in my network, so I checked logs and stats—nothing unusual (I think…I hope…hard to tell sometimes).
I looked more into how this site tracks peers, and it seems they have different levels of confidence. Their first API tier (peer API) is a “best guess” and this is based on listening to the DHT and PeX networks for their known torrents. I’m guessing their website uses this or a combination of this with their other APIs. I looked at my torrent config and saw I hadn’t disabled DHT/PeX and had a couple idle public torrents.
Not positive on this, but I think there can be false positives if your torrent box participates in DHT/PeX even if it doesn’t actually download said torrents. Can anyone confirm this?
the results for me are hilarious, who knew people in my general area downloaded so much porn… and… weird porn at that
it’s literally only porn, who the heck torrents porn?
some of the most hilariously sounding things on that list:
very nsfw- FATAL ECSTASY.rar - I was looking for work as a voice actor but I was made to do a motion capture sex.rar - Picking up girl on the way home from a live show and having sex!.rar - Divine Fuck VR Sex Worship - Sailor Girl Stuck In A Wall.rar - ReEro - Ejaculating in Another World ver.2.0 [EnglishMTL].rar - Intercourse Study Week.rar
And this is why - all together now - “An IP is not an ID”. They don’t know what you’ve downloaded; they know what some number of IP addresses have downloaded from some trackers at some points, and you might be have been assigned one of those IPs after the fact. They aren’t useful, alone.
Their aggressive, misleading and clickbait ads, particularly as YouTube sponsorships. From my experience the product is fine, but the ads make it seem like their covering up for something.
Adding to this, there’s probably a general feeling that, especially with publicly traded companies (which Nord isn’t… yet), profit motive will inevitably cause a company to make decisions that don’t align with its customer’s best interests. The idealist in me thinks it’s possible for a company to be profitable without being shitty towards its customers. The cynic in me thinks there’s probably more profit in being shitty.
That said, profit keeps companies in business. If you’re getting it for free, you’re either the product, pirating it, or relying on others to keep it going. I won’t say paying for it guarantees future availability and development, but that profit motive also motivates continuing development. Kind of a double edged sword, there.
If you would like a more technical explanation search for CG-NAT. It allows ISP’s to share a single static public facing IP with several customers at once.
If you had a true static IP that never changed you’ve only see results about torrents downloaded using your router.
I accidentally clicked on one of the similar IPs links without realizing and someone with that ip happened to have gotten some of the same stuff I did. I was briefly quite worried.
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