Disclaimer: Don't take my response; this post, or other replies seriously.

Everyone has their own feelings. The truth is we probably don't code, understand, and can actually look at the technologies behind vpns. We are just users. That's not a bad thing at all (but) here's the truth.

Our opinions on privacy tools has changed. First proton was weird and mullvad good, now its mullvad is bad and proton is good. That's not consistent and we just have to be honest because there's many people with different beliefs and experiences privacy recommendations will never be consistent.

Let's actually crack open both controversies. Protons was a company the other an individual. The result to the public the same now each company can't be trusted. Vpns are a trust me bro industry and if you can't trust them for whatever reason then just do not use those vpns.

The answer is simple hard to swallow and honestly straight forward. Stop using commercial VPN providers and start using proxies or tor. Vpns and their tunnels where originally developed for private server access not a general tool for app and internet browsing. They're pretty good since the tunnel itself can be hidden or obscured. However the end result is a trust within a company.

So stop trusting people and opinions even mine.

Crypto Bro -> https://cointelegraph.com/opinion/web3-has-a-metadata-problem , https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/why-mixnets-are-needed-to-make-bitcoin-private

Also they love using LLM trained on our works (devs) : https://nym.com/blog/bug-bounty-ai-age

About the fascism I understand that few people here (proportionally) seems to not be educated on the topic (I see to many pedolandians or canadians in here maybe) : fascism is not being a bad guys wanting to control everyone, lots of monarchs were that way, this is not fascism. Fascism is the bourgeoisie (the social class owning the properties, even more so the means of productions) taking power over society, the more power they grab the deeper you're in fascism. That's why many western people do not understand they live in fascist societies while they can agree that money is the real power, not the decrepit old white man put in front (thus they don't understand fascism, and I think this is on purpose, from schools to media).

So a senior research scientist at MIT (CEO) and a founder of Swiss crypto brokerage and financial services firm (COO) decided to create a company in... wait for it... Switzerland! Famous country know for it fight against the aggression of the bourgeoisie for the last century and its strong stance against today's genocides. Definitely not known for being the Nazi's gold vault and all sorts of awful money laundering. If you understand that fascism come from the people who owns the money what do you think about private banks? Swiss is fascists' paradise and it always have been.

I can close my eyes on Swedish people establishing in Sweden, or anyone in his European country, even if the actual government is far-right there or not. But this is not really the case here, it's more like the Y-combinator guys establishing in Delaware or... Cayman Islands! This is 101 people only seeking money at the expense of everyone else. Hence my point of view this is already quiet deep in fascism, even if there are smart enough not to open their mouth about Palestine and keeping themselves into crypto-broing and "privacy" (I could totally see them loving anarcho-capitalism).

Also bonus : what social media do they choose? OH NO! Linkedin and Twitter, I wouldn't have guessed. If you want maximum cringe check the avatar -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexis-roussel-01993143/