VPNs and Trust

I pay for a VPN and use it frequently: Mullvad VPN. It's one of the few pieces of software I gladly pay for and would recommend to others. Having a VPN serves a few purposes for me. First, it provides secure internet communications in insecure circumstances like unencrypted airport/café/hotel Wi-Fi. Second, private internet traffic — VPNs encrypt your traffic until it reaches the exit node, obscuring and batching requests across all of the VPN's users; to support this, Mullvad stores no activity logs and minimizes the data it stores about customers, ensuring that they can't answer who made which requests if they're ever asked. Lastly, Mullvad implements DNS content blockers, including ads and trackers, which help me avoid advertisements inside iOS apps on my phone.

From everything I've seen of Mullvad, they are very serious about confidentiality and privacy and about running their service as best they can. Every time I see articles about VPNs not living up to the features they claim, Mullvad is never on the list. As usual, I came across an article that tested popular VPNs to see if their so-called "Bahamas" or "Somalia" servers actually exist in those countries, and Mullvad's claimed countries are all accurate.

Ben Dowling for IPinfo on 2025-12-07:

In a large-scale analysis of 20 popular VPNs, IPinfo found that 17 of those VPNs exit traffic from different countries than they claim. Some claim 100+ countries, but many of them point to the same handful of physical data centers in the US or Europe.

That means the majority of VPN providers we analyzed don’t route your traffic via the countries they claim to, and they claim many more countries than they actually support.

...

Provider: Mullvad
Claimed Countries: 50
% Virtual or Unmeasurable: 0