Someone put out a paper recently that details how favicons can defeat all kinds of anonymous measures.
I'd switch. I'll note Proton still has the same problems as PIA has recently exhibited with misguided blocklists, although on both platforms they can be disabled. I've heard good things about Mullvad, have no personal experience, but that's probably what I'd switch to if I left Proton. I'm suspicious of any reasonably high speed VPN like this, although I use it.
Has there been another lawsuit to prove if they're tracking users?
The whole upper management team seems to be made out of Lithuanians, as to who is the major shareholder? Your guess is as good as mine since it's not public information. I doubt that they're associated with any government tho.
Do they advertise? They do, don't they? On youtube, even. Good products don't need advertising.
As much as I'm happy to say advertising is a cancer on our society, and advertisers should forced to watch advertisements in a "A Clockwork Orange" type set-up for the rest of their lives/placed in 1m^3 boxes covered in screens and speakers, I don't believe the existence of advertising shouldn't be the standard that makes or breaks a product. Word of mouth just doesn't seem to be the standard anymore, and god forbid anyone takes the word of someone on an internet forum what with shilling the way it is now.
I've been thinking of getting a VPN as of late, even if my cheap behind has to fork out the money for it. I can't seem to find this one website I browsed where the author reviewed VPN's, but what I remember is that he came to different conclusions than seemingly most people regarding the pros and cons of VPN's. His main criteria for whether or not he regarded the VPN as good was that it had to be as secure as possible, from many different aspects. Where the VPN's servers are located, and how the jurisdiction regarding the handling of Internet privacy is in these country/countries, were all things he took into consideration when reviewing the VPN's. He came to the conclusion that NordVPN and ExpressVPN aren't that good, and that ProtonVPN is one of the best in this regard.
This might help. There's also other articles on the site directly comparing them to similar competitors.
See
Do seriously none of them offer openvpn or wireguard configs? And why the hell wouldn't you just make your own killswitch, it's like 3 rules in iptables.
What was it that made it suck? I've used it on Linux and it's fine other than the GUI being a bit clunky.
I think my main problem with it was the inability to check a single option to allow LAN traffic bypass. Kinda of important since I do a lot of LAN only traffic.
A major issue with it is it's so old it's IP addresses are in a fair number of blocklists. I believe it's well over 20 years old. They also have a lot of old school services like ssh tunneling, Usenet, and anonymous remailer access through pulldown menus so you don't have to mess with a remailer client. And they come with free email (and a time-limited throwaway email generator) and a bit of web space.
