r/RecommandedVPN

Sony pushing toward an all-digital PlayStation future accidentally triggered one of the funniest corporate pile-ons I’ve seen in years. VPN companies started openly mocking the gaming industry for selling people “ownership” that can disappear overnight.

Proton joked about launching a “physical VPN” where they’d mail encrypted letters instead of using servers. Windscribe posted fake ads for a “human password manager” that remembers your credentials manually. PureVPN even joked about physically flying customers to another country instead of routing traffic digitally.

The jokes landed because they exposed how ridiculous the current gaming model has become.

Gamers spent years mocking people who cared about DRM, privacy, self-hosting, offline access, or physical ownership. Now suddenly everyone is panicking because they realized paying full price for a digital game doesn’t actually mean you own it.

A publisher can delist it. The platform can revoke access, a server shutdown can kill it forever and your “collection” exists only as long as a corporation allows it.

First it was movies. Then music. Now games. “You bought it” quietly became “you licensed temporary access to it.” And somehow we’re supposed to celebrate that as progress.

On March 2, 2026, Dutch opposition members Barbara Kathmann and Don Ceder brought forth a motion to the Dutch government that every citizen receive a free "basic digital security package" — VPN, password manager, ad blocker, and antivirus — both bundled together and funded publicly. The rationale is that essential digital protection has become too complex and too costly for everyday citizens, and the government must guarantee that there are no citizens digitally at risk because they are unable to pay for a subscription.

The contrast to neighbours is almost absurd. Denmark was looking to ban VPNs all together in December 2025 in order to try to diminish illegal streaming; once security professionals pointed out that banning VPNs would reduce access for legitimate users, they discarded that plan. The UK is working on implementing some method of age-gating VPN access. Meanwhile, the Netherlands is saying that instead of denying access to “any” citizens, they will simply provide a VPN to all citizens for free.

Dutch MP’s are framing the argument as one of cyber resilience and not privacy. With consistent baseline levels of security — encrypted connections, unique passwords, blocking of malicious scripts, etc. — a nation’s cyber-defenders will find it more difficult to infiltrate the population at scale. This is infrastructure thinking being applied to personal security.

It's still just a motion not a law but, so far as I can tell, it is the most interesting VPN Policy Proposal imaginable to come from a democratically elected Government this year by a significant difference. The question it raises is worth giving thought to; Why do most governments automatically restrict access to VPNs when those VPNs are supposed to be essential tools in protecting privacy and having secured connections?

In a world of restrictive thinking, the Netherlands has come out with a new approach. Denmark attempted to ban the use of VPNs; The UK has plans to implement age-gating; Utah held websites responsible for users circumventing their site Blocks by using VPN; And yet one country has proposed the idea of just giving everyone an infrastructure level VPN as a "Universal" right.

What do you think? Should your country be funding universally available VPN access or does placing this type of tool under a government entity present its own privacy issues; and if your country provided you with a government-funded VPN tomorrow would you trust using it? Please drop any comments below!

On May 31, 2024, a new cybersecurity law in Myanmar banned all VPNs. People caught using a VPN could face up to 6 months in prison and be fined. The military has purchased technology from a company whose chief scientist created the Great Firewall of China. The technology allows the military to record and decrypt VPN data using interceptors and decryption at Myanmar's internet gateways.

When I talk to people affected by this, the story that stays with me is a clothing businesswoman from Kachin named Seng. She was using a VPN to hire someone in another city to post on her Facebook page, which was already blocked. After the VPN ban, Seng could no longer use the VPN to hire someone to post on her Facebook page. Police are now doing random checks and are arresting anyone who has a non-compliant app, including a VPN.

NordVPN and Psiphon are both blocked. Most free VPNs no longer operate. People who need to access the internet can either use potentially insecure free tools of unknown origin or have no access. Myanmar Internet Project summarizes this perfectly when they say, "it's a rock and hard place; if you have a VPN that works, there is a lot of uncertainty; and if you don't, everything you do online is at risk."

The resistance government in exile has built its own homegrown VPN, approved by their cabinet. That's how serious this is. they're fighting a civil war and part of that fight is maintaining an encrypted communication channel the junta can't block.

Myanmar is currently tied with China for the worst internet freedom environment in the world according to Freedom House. That's not a ranking, that's a verdict.

India is once again moving toward stricter rules for VPN providers, including requirements like establishing a local presence, appointing compliance officers, and closer cooperation with government requests.

The main issue is that many major VPN providers are not willing to comply with the core expectation behind these rules: user data retention and logging obligations.

This isn’t new. Under the CERT-In framework introduced in 2022, VPN companies are already expected to store sensitive user data such as IP addresses and identity information for several years and share it with authorities upon request.

Instead of complying, several providers including Proton VPN and NordVPN scaled back their physical presence in India, removing local servers and relying on offshore or virtual setups to avoid storing data locally.

The new proposals push further in the same direction, increasing pressure for local oversight. For privacy-focused VPNs, this directly conflicts with their no-logs policies and operating model.

What’s emerging is less a technical debate and more a standoff: governments pushing for traceability, and VPN providers trying to preserve anonymity and minimize data collection.

Supporters see this as necessary for tackling cybercrime and fraud, while critics argue it undermines the core privacy guarantees VPNs are built on.

Feels like providers will either have to adapt heavily or gradually pull back from the market.

In July 2022, with the start of the UK Online Safety Act age verification requirements, Proton VPN reported a 1400% increase in UK sign-ups within minutes of the implementation of enforcement; likewise, NordVPN recorded a 1000% increase in UK subscription via the same time frame. After the initial wave of sign-ups, Ofcom later reported that daily active users of VPNs in the UK temporarily increased to approximately 1.5 million users before settling around 1 million at the end of September.

Often overlooked are the details of who drove the surge in VPN users — it was adults who did not want to provide government-issued ID, banking information or facial scans to uncontrolled third-party age verifications services (many of whom had relationships with the adult content providers being regulated). Researchers/journalists who examined the demographic data consistently concluded that the majority of VPN users were adults using the service for legitimate reasons.

The Ashley Madison data breach keeps coming up in these discussions largely due to the documented accounts of 32 million users worth of account information being compromised, blackmail campaigns utilizing that data and documented accounts of people committing suicide as a result of this breach. As you can see, people remember all too well when sensitive data ends up in the wrong hands.

The public manager of the Proton Group, like any large organization, has a perspective around the interaction between child protection legislation and online privacy. In his opinion, a privacy violation occurred when OSA tried to solve a child safety problem. The evidence provided to the government of this failure is the use of tools like Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) by individuals trying to protect their information. The government's response to the evidence of the shortcomings of age verification solutions is to limit those tools as well.

What do you think? Is there a method of verifying a person's age (or lack thereof) without putting them through a greater violation of privacy than that which needs to be solved? I am very interested in hearing where the community is on these issues.

Spain just proved why VPNs are no longer “optional” tools for pirates or nerds, they’re becoming basic internet survival tools.

La Liga’s anti-piracy crusade reportedly ended up blocking 500,000+ legitimate websites in Spain by nuking shared IP infrastructure used by Cloudflare, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.

Human rights sites. Government pages. Environmental orgs. Random businesses. All collateral damage because football executives decided they should control what the entire country can access online.

And now they’re going after VPN providers like Proton AG and Nord Security because people used them to bypass the blocks.

This is the dangerous part nobody talks about: every time governments or corporations normalize infrastructure-level censorship “for piracy,” it ALWAYS expands. Today it’s football streams. Tomorrow it’s whatever they decide is “harmful.”

Meanwhile the actual pirates just move domains in 5 minutes.

VPNs aren’t the problem here. The problem is giving private companies the power to break chunks of the internet with zero accountability. At this point, using a VPN in Spain during football weekends is less about piracy and more about accessing websites that shouldn’t have been blocked in the first place.

The craziest part? They reportedly only block around 60% of piracy sites anyway.

At present, the UK Parliament has a petition with a deadline of July 23, 2026. The petition is under the title “Do Not Ban Children from Using VPNs." In order to get a response from the government, it requires at least 10,000 signatures, and in order to be considered for debate by parliament, the petition must get 100,000 signatures.

As we know, the central argument of the petition already exists in this community – any enforcement mechanism that an online safety initiative creates to place an age restriction on using a VPN will require using facial recognition technology or a third-party ID check for everyone – many millions of adults, therefore will need to use invasive verification just so they can continue to use the same tools for legitimate purposes; this will ultimately create significant collateral damage due to the problem of adults being identified by technology for an issue that teenagers will be able to work around within 5 minutes of being banned.

Additionally, Dame Rachel de Souza, Children's Commissioner, has already publicly called for the Prime Minister to restrict children from using VPNs, and the government has also acknowledged that it has commissioned a study on circumvention of VPNs and that it will provide an update in July 2021. The timeframe for receiving that update is now a matter of weeks.

Here we go again. India wants to force VPN providers to establish local offices and designate compliance officers, even threatening prison terms for local employees for non-compliance.

Not sure how authorithies could enforce this, though, considering that major providers already removed their physical servers from the country in 2022. Will VPN censorship be the last resort?

NordVPN now offers a private, dedicated VPN server as an add-on. Not for everyone, perhaps, but I can see it as a good feature for gamers and other power users...

Malaysian officials say VPNs aren’t illegal by themselves. They claim the crackdown is mainly aimed at people using them for stuff like scams, child exploitation, or other illegal activity online. The government is also teaming up with telecom companies, police, and regulators to push enforcement of the new Online Safety Act 2025.

Authorities say the move comes after a spike in online child abuse cases, and that social platforms operating in Malaysia will need to follow the country’s safety rules or potentially face restrictions and legal trouble.

But a lot of people online aren’t fully buying it either. Privacy advocates and regular users point out that VPNs are used for plenty of normal reasons; staying private online, avoiding tracking, securing public Wi-Fi, or just browsing more safely. Some are worried that once stricter age verification systems are in place, it could slowly turn into wider internet surveillance or tighter control over online content.

At this point, the debate feels less like “should kids be protected online?”, because almost everyone agrees with that, and more like “how far should governments go before privacy and internet freedom start taking a hit?”

Reddit is rolling out age verification across the EU and EEA to comply with the Digital Services Act.

If you’re in Europe, you may soon need to verify your age to access certain NSFW or age-restricted communities.

Another reminder that online anonymity keeps shrinking, even on platforms that used to value pseudonymity.

One of the four largest mobile operators in Russia has created a 'whitelisted' restricted VPN for users on its Bee plan; everything will work without having to download an app or pay an extra fee. Subscribers can automatically access Spotify, Netflix, Ticketmaster, and Brawl Stars through the default VPN service once they received the VPN. Companies that decided to suspend their operations in Russia after the invasion of Ukraine would now be available via this Russian State-Owned service.

At the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, it was proposed that this program be developed, and Beeline’s CEO indicated that these services were not prohibited, but had been stopped for 'convenience and for purposes of fairness' to Russians. The Kremlin supported this programme, and T2 is projected to follow suit.

That's pretty funny, isn't it? For years, Russia has been closing down 469 VPNs, taxing individuals for being heavy VPN users, and charging ISPs for enabling individuals to access YouTube and other services as a result of their foreign policy. Now, the government has begun creating their own VPN in order to re-enable access for individuals to Western services that have stopped operating in Russia due to protest of what Russia is doing abroad. You really have a commitment and a way of doing things that is a level of total contradiction, don't you?

Now, to be blunt here, this is a "whitelist" VPN, not a "privacy" VPN. Beeline knows exactly who you are and what you are doing with this VPN. To facilitate all of this, the SORM (the Kremlin's systematic surveillance infrastructure) is in place and operating. You now have access again to Netflix; however, in exchange for that access, you have to give up any semblance of privacy. A reasonable trade for many Russians would be access to Spotify. For anyone that actually has legitimate reasons to stay under the states radar, this is not a reasonable trade or situation.

On June 15, a new discovery was published that is particularly interesting due to the attack vector being one that most people have not even considered.

Researchers from Mysk analyzed VPN app's assignment of internal tunnel IP addresses on iOS using a tool called Loupe, and found that most VPN's (Mullvad included) assign a unique static IP address for each session inside the tunnel. iOS applications can read the internal tunnel IP address at any time, which means it serves as a persistent fingerprint across all of the applications on your device, even if your external IP address is indeed hidden. According to TechCrunch.

Proton VPN is the only provider to achieve this — all users are assigned the same reserved local address (10.2.0.2). Anyone using Proton VPN will have the same internal fingerprint for any given local IP address. As such, there is nothing to extract as a fingerprint because all users appear the same to anyone using iOS tools to monitor tunnel IPs. According to TechCrunch.

The practical impact is that iOS tools may allow for monitoring of tunnel IPs enabling the separation of one person’s activity from another, even if they are both using a VPN with their home IP masks.

This is another example of a type of privacy gap that might not hit the headlines because it’s very technical & because it's an incredibly small hole in the wall yet it’s going to be the type of attack vector that really matters for anyone who has a true threat model. You can have a perfect no-logs VPN running perfectly and still have the potential for tracking across multiple apps on an iPhone because of how the tunnel IP is assigned.

Proton hasn't made this big deal about it; they just built it right at the outset which should be acknowledged. I assume Mullvad will be implementing a fix, however at the current time if you are using iOS and privacy is your reason for using a provider, then this finding has a real impact on which provider you choose to use.

Gabon has officially suspended major social media platforms “until further notice,” claiming it’s to fight misinformation and protect national stability. Almost immediately, reports showed a massive spike in VPN usage as people looked for ways around the restrictions.

Every time a government blocks access to platforms, the same thing happens:
People don’t stop using the internet, they just start using VPNs.

This is another reminder that online privacy and unrestricted access to information matter more than ever.

Just a day after the UK government announced its proposed social media ban for under-16s, several digital rights organizations have launched a new campaign called Stop Killing the Internet.

The campaign is backed by groups including Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, and Index on Censorship. They argue that policies like mandatory age verification and expanded online restrictions risk increasing surveillance, reducing privacy, and creating broader controls over internet access in the name of protecting children.

According to the organizers, the campaign isn't against child safety, it argues that there are better ways to protect young people without requiring invasive identity checks or undermining digital rights for everyone.

The movement is also calling for public support and has launched a petition urging the UK government to reconsider the proposed legislation

On June 10th, 2026, Canada introduced Bill C-34 to implement an under-16 social media ban that includes a mandatory age verification requirement for all users.

Three key Anglophone democracies (Australia, the UK and Canada) passed similar laws within six months of each other, signifying that they are all following a coordinated approach to policy diffusion.

In order to evaluate the impact of the primary legislation on other countries, Cybernews analyzed Reddit discussions regarding age verification bypass methods using data collected from May 2025 through April 2026. The data showed that the number of Reddit threads related to bypassing age verification requirements increased from one thread to 65 threads during the study period, for a total of 241 threads throughout the study period.

Following the enforcement of the UK age verification requirements in July, 2025, the number of comments on age verification bypass methods increased 460%. Furthermore, in August, 2025, there were two million VPNs downloaded in the UK. In March, 2026, there were 871,000 VPNs downloaded in Australia, nearly three times the amount downloaded in February, 2026, when adult content restrictions were put in place.

This rapid increase in downloads suggests that minors aren’t the only users seeking to bypass age verification, but there are also many adults who do not trust the platforms they are required to provide their government-issued identification and facial scans to.

Where will this end? Can we find an effective method for verifying age that protects an individual’s privacy? Or is this a never-ending escalating cycle where government regulation will fail? If the UK statement in July moves forward with requiring all VPN users to verify their age will the way you use technology change, or will you find another way around the rule? Please provide your thoughts below.

I understand that tech founders are entirely free to hold personal political affiliations. But this incident still raises broader questions about whether we want privacy-focused firms to be entangled with political groups — regardless of where they sit on the ideological spectrum.

Do you think Mullvad users should drop their subscription over this?

Stop scrolling through sponsored listicles. Here's the honest version.

After going through dozens of Reddit threads and testing these myself, four names consistently come out on top and they each win for different reasons.

Proton VPN is my top pick overall. it's the only VPN whose no-logs policy has been stress-tested in actual court proceedings, not just a paid audit. it now covers 145 countries, more than any other major provider, it's based in Switzerland outside 14 Eyes jurisdiction, and the free plan is genuinely usable. If you care about trust above everything else, nothing comes close.

NordVPN wins on speed and streaming. its network just crossed 100 Tbps across 211 locations and NordLynx regularly delivers 1,000+ Mbps in real tests. Post-quantum encryption already lives. If you're watching the World Cup or unblocking Netflix libraries, Nord is the most reliable tool for that job right now.

Mullvad is what privacy purists actually run. no email to sign up, cash payments accepted, and their obfuscation stack is built specifically to defeat state-level DPI. Not beginner-friendly. not a streaming VPN. but if your threat model is serious, it's the most trustworthy infrastructure in the space.

Surfshark if budget matters or you need unlimited devices. solid speeds, cheap two-year plans, good enough for most people.

Bottom line:

Trust and privacy → Proton.

Speed and streaming → Nord.

Serious OPSEC → Mullvad.

Value → Surfshark.

Whatever you do, please avoid any free VPN you've never heard of. That's where the real risk is in 2026.

I feel like split tunneling is one of those VPN features almost nobody talks about until they actually start using it… and then suddenly they can’t live without it.

For anyone who doesn’t know, it basically lets you choose which apps go through the VPN and which ones use your normal connection. And honestly, it solves so many annoying VPN problems.

For example, I’ll keep my browser and torrent client behind the VPN, but leave stuff like banking apps, food delivery, local streaming, or certain games outside of it. No more CAPTCHAs every 10 minutes, no random login flags, and no weird latency issues everywhere. It also makes VPNs feel way less “all or nothing.”

I think a lot of people try a VPN once, see slower speeds or broken apps, then give up completely because they don’t realize you can route traffic selectively.

Another underrated use case: work.
I know people who keep company tools outside the VPN while routing personal browsing through encrypted servers. Or they’ll use the VPN only for geo-restricted content while everything else stays local for speed.

Honestly, this feature matters way more to me than whether a provider has “10,000 servers in 120 countries” or whatever marketing stat they’re flexing now. The weird part is that some VPNs still don’t support split tunneling properly on all platforms, especially on macOS where it can still be messy depending on the provider.

On 16th June, UK Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on BBC Breakfast the government will be issuing a report of VPN specifically in July 2026 - along with new rules on restrictions of AI Chatbots and overnight curfews for teenagers. This has to be the best sign yet that we have moved from a political noise level to actively writing policy. Inkl

Children's Minister Josh MacAlister best described the issue on the BBC when he stated, "There are options on how we could restrict the VPNs based upon age, I think that would be very welcome." The statement made in a public forum on policy from Government Ministers who work directly to create Policy or Laws.

The full legislative picture is as follows; House of Lords passed Amendment 207-159 banning provision of VPNs & 17 and younger. The Commons rejected us in March 2023 with 321-106 double the number of votes. However, Parliament granted a general power to allow regulation to restrict use of specified Internet Services by children; thereby negating necessity for a separate bill regarding VPN use by Children. Yahoo

So what do you guys think?