How can you protect privacy if paying for a vpn? I had cyberghost which i got with a magazine.A special not the free one. Now the sub is out. If I renew to cleverbridge with a credit card then they have my details. They say they do not share it with CG and CG do not keep logs so is it safe to renew with credit card? Anyone experience of this?
Bitcoin and prepaid visas, ala vanilla ones that you pay a small extra charge but are disposable afterwards, what else do you need?
See https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/advanced-privacy-and-anonymity-part-7 I now think that Electrum is a better light Bitcoin client than MultiBit.
Here in the US you used to be able to sign up for them with dummy credentials, a fake email address & name, etc... But now you can't use them for overseas purchases anymore, so that ended that luxury, since all the trustworthy VPN's are outside of the US. Now the only way to really ensure anonymity is cash money in an envelope with no personally identifiable information. With Mullvad you can send them just an envelope with money in it and an customer ID# that you can obtain on their site. And if you go there and get it from someone elses puter (not your own home), or a wireless hotspot, etc... that keeps your anonymity intact. But since the VPN you connect to primarily can see everything (your real IP, etc...), and your ISP can see that VPN too, you're best off chaining 2 VPN's together and not much worrying about how you pay for the one you're going to connect to first. Then use Mullvad as your outer layer so that it masks your primary VPN & ISP from seeing what you're doing, and then Mullvad doesn't know who you are. And for even more privacy run a proxy tunnel right through the middle of it all so that even Mullvad can't see what you're doing either. By using TOR or even just the Ixquick proxy with FF's about:config & other options configured properly. And yeah, use only your VPN's DNS addresses. Hard code them into your router for good measure too. And if you can afford it get a router that can handle at least the "OpenVPN Small" dd-wrt build and run your OpenVPN through that. And set FW rules so that if Mullvad drops your entire internet connection drops as well. That's how I roll anyhow.
If you're connecting to the VPN from your home IP, they already know who you are, so it really doesn't matter that much how you pay for it (Paypal or your personal credit card is fine). If you are using chained VPN's, then you should pay for the second or third hops with Bitcoin that's been run through a mixer. And never change the order of the chain, or access anything remotely personally identifiable from the second or third hop VPN (any account you ever accessed from your home IP or even VPN 1).
Due to European Data retention laws, I wouldn't write off the US as a place for a VPN provider. Depends on what you are using a VPN for. For Torrenting and such, it is fine. A lot of VPN providers choose the US because it is free of data retention laws, not to mention European censorship of pirate sites which, ironically, has been brought about by US based interests who have been unable to establish such censorship at home. http://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-vpn-service-provider-review-2015-150228/ For a free open uncensored internet, the US is a good choice. So is Japan. Most of the world censors the internet in some way. If you want to pursue deep anonymity, a multi hop setup is the way to go. There are always free VPN subscriptions out there and they can be layered on top of a paid VPN. Pay for one that you feel you can trust and get a few free "burner" subscriptions that have no payment transaction records that can be traced.
My friend now tells me CyberGhost say when you pay through cleverbridge that there is no way of connecting the credit card details given to cleverbridge with the cyberghost account. cleverbridge would only know one has CG not the ip or username etc one has or ervers they use. And CG keep no logs anyway. What do you guys think of that scenario?
