this post was submitted on 20 May 2026
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• Proton VPN has hit back at Canada's proposed Bill C-22

• The proposed legislation could require VPNs to log user metadata

• NordVPN and Windscribe have also slammed the bill

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[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 19 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Oh look Proton is trying to score some PR bullshit when they will comply with the law just like they comply with the laws in their country. They are a greedy corporation who sells security theatre.

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (17 children)

Firstly Proton is a non-profit.

Secondly security and privacy are two different things (albeit their connected).

Thirdly no company, for-profit or otherwise, is going to break the law for you.

[–] r1veRRR@feddit.org 3 points 1 day ago

There's following the law, and then there's giving away data to government agency just because they asked nicely, and could MAYBE get a warrant in the future. It is the equivalent of letting police into your house without a warrant, because maybe they'll get one.

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[–] crypt0cler1c@infosec.pub 25 points 1 day ago (3 children)

You're the kind of guy who confuses and conflates security, privacy, and anonymity all the while somehow expecting companies to operate beyond the law.

You can't make this shit up. Hahahaha

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[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago (19 children)

Kinda have to comply with laws mate

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[–] mlg@lemmy.world 61 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Also Proton: "metadata logging does not count as logging, and handing our logs, I mean non existent logs that only contains totally useless metadata, over to the Swiss government is fine because its the Swiss law"

[–] parricc@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago (6 children)

I worked for a VPN company a decade ago that advertised no logging. It was all BS. They absolutely logged. Maybe they only kept the logs for something like 48 hours, but I'm pretty sure all VPNs have some kind of logging going on. Anyway, a VPN by itself does not give you any privacy. Websites have a billion ways to fingerprint you, and they don't even need cookies to do it.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 3 points 1 day ago

VPNs are to protect you against your ISP, that is about it. I guess sailing the high seas also since fingerprinting doesn't apply as much. Also getting around authoritarian government blocks.

It is a small piece of the puzzle.

[–] Alberat@lemmy.world 17 points 2 days ago (2 children)

privacy implies vpn (or some mix-net), but not the opposite... so if you want privacy, you need a vpn, but a vpn by itself doesn't give you privacy

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[–] Vinstaal0@feddit.nl 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I kinda want to see what they handed over. They cannot get around the fact that they need to be able to handover data when legally asked with a warrant.

But I do kinda want to see if it is actually useless metadata or it is just our entire history.

[–] parricc@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago (7 children)

Most likely, the logs consist of what IPs are leased to what users, when the connections start and end, and what IPs those users are connecting from. A VPN company may keep the logs for something like 2 days.

Let's say you torrent something while connected to a VPN and one of the peers in the torrent pool is actually a DMCA agent associated with IP-Echelon. The DMCA agent will record the IP address you have at the time and generate a DMCA notice. It will then look up who owns the IP address to determine where to send the DMCA notice. When the VPN company receives the DMCA notice, it will use the logs to determine who was leasing the IP address at the time in question. If the logs no longer exist, the notice effectively gets tossed because the VPN company has no way of knowing what account was downloading the torrent. But if the notice was sent quickly enough for the logs to still exist, the VPN company will forward the DMCA notice to the user that was using the IP at the time. In that case, it will work the same way as a normal ISP. You'll probably get a warning with something like a 3 strike policy. In such a case, the VPN will cut your VPN service on the third strike.

Presumably, it could work the same way for anything. I used to work for a VPN company a decade ago, and this was pretty much the industry standard. It, like all VPN companies, advertised itself as having no logging.

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[–] minorkeys@sh.itjust.works 208 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

JFC were losing the internet everywhere.... we're just slaves to nation-states and corporations...

[–] Comet79@lemmy.world 135 points 2 days ago (12 children)

Turns out voting for conservatives has consequences.

[–] minorkeys@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

Canada isn't led by conservatives, though, it isn't just conservatives.

[–] toebert@piefed.social 63 points 2 days ago (9 children)

Joke's on you, in the UK we have a "left wing" government and they're doing the best they can to fight against privacy!

Oh wait.. I guess the joke's on us nvm.

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

As much as this chart is misused, it shows that left and right can be both authoritarian - thus pushing anti-privacy nightmare like this.

There is a war going on against online freedom, and we are losing.

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[–] Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 94 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (16 children)

If you're a Canadian, please contact your MP about bill C-22, and do it now. They're voting on this in the next few days.

https://dontsurveil.me/

Salt Typhoon, a hacking group connected to the Chinese government, used the backdoors put in place by CALEA in the US to spend months buried deep in US telecoms providers surveilling citizens. The Liberals are proposing to put in place a worse version of those exact same backdoors. Bring this up to your MP, remind them that when the Chinese (or North Koreans, Iranians, Russians, or even Americans) inevitably exploit these backdoors to do the same thing to us, it's going to blow up in their faces.

Read the link above for more salient points about why this is bad law. Read Open Media's articles on it (https://openmedia.org/press/item/ottawa-repackages-its-surveillance-backdoor-in-bill-c-22). Bring up these points to your MP. Email them. Phone and demand to speak to them. Make a stink about this.

If nothing else, send the form letter from Open Media (the other options are better, but something is better than nothing); https://action.openmedia.org/page/188754/action/1#main-content

They already tried to pass this law once and it failed. Yes, they have a majority now, but it is a very slim majority. If a few MPs defect this bill will die.

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[–] mechoman444@lemmy.world 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

I just paid $80 for one year of proton. 2 years ago I paid $40 for 2 years.

Use information however you will.

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[–] Leviathan@lemmy.world 64 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Why is our liberal government a fuckass conservative government?

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

Neoliberals want that the entity controlled by voters - the elected government/president/whatever (depending on country) - to not watch over or control the things which are important for Money (in their parlance, to "not interfere with the Free Market", which in turn justifies privatising everything).

In other words, to make the Power which is controlled by voters be below the Power Of Money.

They're against Democracy and in favor of Oligarch with "democracy" as a theatrical façade focused only on Moral subjects and not doing anything at all for other things which constrain the Freedom of most people.

Notice how the more hard-core Neoliberal the mainstream "center"-"left" parties in a country are (and the one Canada is pretty hard-core compared to most of Europe, tough even then not quite at the level of the Democrats in the US) the more their entire public political fight with the (Fascist) "center"-right is in the Moral space (Identity Politics) and the less it is in terms of freedoms which are limited by the control of Money over everything required for survival (with productive and shelter assets being owned mainly by a handful of people, so the rest are forced to toil within conditions controled the former group merely to have food and shelter).

In summary, they shrink "Democracy" down to a system that represents voters in the Moral sphere only where they loudly "battle" the "right" and everything else important to voters is controller not by a system where every person has one and only one vote and all votes count the same, but by a system where each dollar is a "vote" and some people have billions more "votes" than others - in other words, it's not Democracy anymore because in most domains the vote which is equal for all individuals controls nothing at all.

I'm not fully familiar with the politics in Canada (though what I've seen of the Liberals is basically what I describe above), but all of this shit is painfully obvious in both the US and Britain, plus it has already infiltrated the rest of Europe to quite an extent (especially the EU, since Neoliberals use its supranational powers which are supposedly to facilitate Trade Integration, to force Neoliberal policies on countries, especially those in the Eurozone).

Anyways, all this to say that the increasing Authoritarianism you see in the more Neoliberal countries is the mainstream "center" parties which control power making sure they can detect and subvert early any civil society movements which might wrestly power away from them - in other words, the final destruction of whatever is left of Democracy and the path which is still left through the vote to undo the Oligarchic system (which would require the mainstream parties to lose most of their vote to alternatives naturally born from the civil society which weren't just puppets created by wealthy individuals, something which already is very difficult in countries with First Past The Post systems and which total civil society surveilance is meant to make impossible)

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