Someone on the piracy subreddit made a
VPN comparison table on Google Sheets that goes over speed, encryption, audit log availability, etc.. Popular providers like NordVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad are listed, as well as smaller VPN services. It's by no means an exhaustive table list in terms of functionality, features, and performance. Take the sheet with a grain of salt, and be sure to do your own research before committing to a VPN. RAM-only servers are preferable for VPN providers, since it better adheres to privacy and a no-log policy.
I was surprised to see that Mullvad is part of the Fourteen Eyes (something that hadn't crossed my mind when I bought the service, as I was only aware of the Five Eyes country agreement). I also find it interesting how NordVPN was ranked highly, given that they're typically associated with YouTube sponsorships (which have a long track history of being absolute garbage products or services).
I find the "x Eyes = super bad" mentality insanely schizophrenic, if you're actually this worried about surveillance then you're either super autistic about reaching 100% privacy by using inherently unprivate technology or you're planning to do some heinous shit, and I'm not talking torrenting, if you're that worried about it you probably should be on a watchlist to begin with. And the thing with VPN's is that even if they are in the most "privacy friendly" jurisdiction imaginable, they just as well might be a fed honeypot and log everything you do.
I only recently paid for Mullvad VPN and it's my first contact with a paid VPN service and I find it to work rather well. I'm not worried about Mullvad ratting me out for daring to torrent shit, because that's not the reason those "x Eyes" agreements are being made. Same with bypassing regional locks or IP locks, that's the reason I wanted a VPN and Mullvad is perfectly fine for that despite being located in Sweden.
Generally, my stance on schizoprivacy is this: look at what Richard Stallman is doing. Are you willing to make the same sacrifices as him? If not, then you'll never reach your imaginary goal of privacy and you're losing your mind over nothing. What rms is doing is as close to absolute privacy when using computers as you can get in the modern age, and if you're not willing to go to the same extent then you are simply wasting your time, because the goalpost you've given yourself is unreachable. You can only increase your privacy, but not to 100%.
Also, now that I'm looking through that chart, it seems rather odd that when it comes to payment forms both Mullvad and NordVPN have the same amount of "yes" yet NordVPN scores lower. Then you have the customer support chart where the only metric
that counts towards the average is how many forms of communication they have, not how good the customer support is, with NordVPN having a "positively reviewed" note.
And again, in ethics both Mullvad and Nord score the same but Nord has a lower score. There are also metrics for the amounts of owned servers which also doesn't tell you much about how good the service is but still counts towards the average, with Nord having less servers in less countries than PIA, yet Nord scores 5 while PIA scores 4.
This chart feels heavily diluted with superfluous bullshit, with a lot of it being lower for other good providers like Mullvad, with NordVPN having the score arbitrarily lowered in some charts despite being on par with something like Mullvad, and even then it ends up with a much much better average than Mullvad, and has TWO discount links out of all the providers on the list. But in all honesty, that's what you'd expect from a Redditor, subreddits are only useful for their megathreads which are just curated link indexes and that's it.
