this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
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I found that Mozilla VPN uses Mullvad servers and I thought it may be a good way to use Mullvad while supporting Mozilla. Then after further research I found that Mozilla bought an ad firm for 'privacy-centric-advertising' and that sounded sus to me. Is it reasonable to suspect that Mozilla VPN may not be as private as Mullvad VPN?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It's just rebadged Mullvad.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)

@[email protected] , unless you work for Mozilla, you have no idea what else they added in to the base service and none of us should blindly trust them, since Mozilla VPN is not an open source project.

I use Mozilla VPN and I also have this concern, @[email protected] but other than the public docs from Mozilla, I'm not sure how anyone outside the company can answer this.

For instance, this page (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/features/) talks a lot about how your browsing is improved thru their VPN, but doesn't go intomuch depth on what they do with the data flowing through their/Mullvad's servers, other than to say, "We never log, track or share your network data. Simply put, we don’t collect your personal browsing information."

This page has more detail -- https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/subscription-services --, but still, you end up either trusting them or you don't. I do, currently.

Also, each time I start up the VPN app on Ubuntu, I see a prompt asking if I want to enable the "Share technical data" feature. I say no and it still works just fine. You might trust Mozilla more than I do with that data but I do trust them to not send it when the feature is disabled.

And then the next screen asks if I want the VPN app to block ads, trackers and/or malware. (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-change-my-privacy-features) I already have Pihole on my network, so I don't enable those features either. I suspect they incur network traffic thru Mozilla (specifically) but again, the docs do not cover how these feature work under the hood. So again, how much do you trust Mozilla?

As always, YMMV. You can reach out to their Support and see if they'll answer your questions, of course. I've dealt with them before and they're OK to work with.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

And then the next screen asks if I want the VPN app to block ads, trackers and/or malware. (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-do-i-change-my-privacy-features) I already have Pihole on my network, so I don't enable those features either.

Those DNS blocklist features are on Mullvad as well. FYI your PiHole won't work while connected thru VPN, if it does you're leaking DNS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

Oh snap. I should'a thought of that! Thanks

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Yeah. I was shocked when I saw:

Using Mullvad VPN (...)

while connected to the Mozilla VPN.