What I’m saying is one step more cynical that that. I’m saying is that you can’t fully trust anyone with your privacy. The best you can do is try to determine who will treat you best based on the motivation involved. VPNs take resources to operate. In our current society that means money, but even in the absence of money, there’s labour, hardware, and electricity costs that go into making it work. Expecting someone to just eat that cost in perpetuity is unreasonable. If the cost is being covered by the users, there is much less incentive for the operator to do anything shady with the data they have access to.
I fully agree with that and I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I was simply critiquing the actual phrase. Not trying to claim that the free vpns are in any way reliable or should EVER be trusted. I really did just mean that the phrase itself in (imo), quite problematic overall because if the inherent messaging that the only trustworthy distributers and maintainers of software are for-profit and any other model must be predatory. It completely undermines any proposal of FOSS being valid and safe. Which I think we can all (on the fediverse) agree is something we shouldn’t purpetuate as a genralization. That was all I was trying to say.
What I’m saying is one step more cynical that that. I’m saying is that you can’t fully trust anyone with your privacy. The best you can do is try to determine who will treat you best based on the motivation involved. VPNs take resources to operate. In our current society that means money, but even in the absence of money, there’s labour, hardware, and electricity costs that go into making it work. Expecting someone to just eat that cost in perpetuity is unreasonable. If the cost is being covered by the users, there is much less incentive for the operator to do anything shady with the data they have access to.
I fully agree with that and I think there’s been a misunderstanding. I was simply critiquing the actual phrase. Not trying to claim that the free vpns are in any way reliable or should EVER be trusted. I really did just mean that the phrase itself in (imo), quite problematic overall because if the inherent messaging that the only trustworthy distributers and maintainers of software are for-profit and any other model must be predatory. It completely undermines any proposal of FOSS being valid and safe. Which I think we can all (on the fediverse) agree is something we shouldn’t purpetuate as a genralization. That was all I was trying to say.