Best country to VPN to?

batopera@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 78 points –

The VPN provider I use has servers in multiple countries. I was wondering if privacy laws would make it better to VPN to some countries over others when pirating.

37

As long as your VPN provider is a proven no-logger, just go with the best performance.

But if you really want to pick countries, Eastern Europe, Italy and Switzerland just to name a few. If you are in the US I wouldn’t be crossing the pond with my VPN but that’s up to you.

Never heard Italy before. Do they have stricter laws than EU in general?

I’ve heard from Italian friends that been doing it for ever and nothing happened.

If you are in US probably any latin country except Mexico, Puerto Rico and Panama should be OK.

Why do people keep saying that Puerto Rico is a country?!

Third time this year.

I know it but it is another territory so...

That's not a strong argument to call Puerto Rico a country.

That's like saying that Japan and Okinawa are two countries.

Edit: downvoted by geography dufuses.

Edit 2: whoops. Doofuses.

It's doofus.

I think many people feel like Puerto Rico is its own country due to how it is treated by the US.

Thanks for the doofus correction. Whoops.

Puerto Rico treatment

Hm. I guess.

Curious what it is about those countries that would cause you to advise against using them?

They are strongly aligned with US, and this kind of countries are usually more aggressive against piracy.

Why wouldn't you be crossing the pond for that? Legal reasons? Latency reasons?

Because what I said in the first paragraph. If your provider is not a proven no-logger, get another one.

I’m not entirely sure on the absolute best, but I always use Switzerland. I believe they have extremely strong privacy laws that protect individual privacy and I believe they have a relaxed view on downloading so long as it is solely for personal use, though uploading / sharing torrenting is still very much disallowed.

... so that's why our servers are always so fucking slow.

I use ProtonVPN's Secure Core. Their entry nodes are in privacy-friendly countries — Switzerland, Iceland, or Sweden — and exit nodes can be to any of their VPN servers in dozens of countries around the world. It's a double hop which increases latency slightly, but I don't real-time game on this configuration.

https://protonvpn.com/features/secure-core

If you are in the US, stick with US servers on a no-log VPN. Crossing the border with your traffic allows agencies to collect way more data.

What no-log VPNs are out there in the U.S.? Anything similar to Mullvad?

I don't mean US based, I mean US servers. Mullvad has US servers.

Can't really comment on 14-eyes, but 100% avoid the US, UK, AU, NZ, and maybe CA based companies. I personally don't use Mullvad anymore since they stopped supporting port forwarding, but it's an otherwise great VPN.

What do you use now?

I switched to Proton VPN and the gluetun docker container for port forwarding.

I'm not a very privacy focused person, so I won't give you recommendations.

Just look at reviews that are recent and are from trustworthy but non-mainstream sources. There are some popular news sites that get revenue from paid links, which will give some less-than-ideal recommendations. It's best to choose a VPN provider with a history of passing 3rd-party audits.

I will say, though, that Mullvad has some great speeds and is stupid-easy to use.

PIA is a proven no-logger. They are also fast as hell.

I use PIA's Canada servers for torrenting because they are (geographically) closest to the US with port forwarding. No issues, been using them for years.

depends. anything illegal/political extremist shoot for something outside of the fourteen eyes.

Maybe try the smallest country that borders the country that sells Vytautas mineral water?

Spoiler alert: it's Latvia.

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