Note: I am not OOP, the OOP is u/lyf-ftw on r/privacy. I posted this here because I am also curious about URNetwork’s privacy practices and I need a free VPN. I am really in a bad financial state right now, and I can’t afford to pay subscriptions. And before anyone suggests to go with Proton’s free VPN plan - the “privacy laws” in my country MANDATE all VPN providers to log their customers. Every VPN provider which have their app listed on Google Play Store and Apple App Store in our country MUST log their customers. When this bill passed in our country, some VPN providers made their apps unavailable to customers from our country on both the app stores. But Proton didn’t, it’s available for download on both the app stores till now. This sparked a lot of discussions online in forums related to our country (reddit and elsewhere). Many speculated that Proton accepted to log their customers in our country because they didn’t want to lose their customer base in our country. Since then, whenever someone asks for VPN suggestions on forums related to our country the majority recommend not using Proton. The privacy conscious folks here mainly used VPN’s listed on F-Droid. I used Mullvad VPN for a while but it had it’s own issues- it randomly disconnected sometimes and expect from a few servers everything was slow. It was not worth paying a premium (over other VPN’s) in my use case as I need 24/7 uninterrupted VPN and good speed. I can’t pay for it now anyway. So here I am asking for free VPN suggestions.

Original post:

I came across URNetwork, a decentralized virtual private network (VPN) developed by BringYour, Inc. , whose team members hail from Palantir. The URNetwork Connect client, protocol, and API are published on GitHub. The team emphasizes an open-core philosophy to ensure privacy, security, and availability. They also claim to oppose censorship. The app is available on the official F-Droid repository, which is encouraging for users focused on open source and privacy. My main questions for the community are: Given the team’s Palantir background, should we be more skeptical of their undisclosed data collection practices? Has an independent audit of their GitHub repository been performed, or has traffic been run through their network to verify their anonymity guarantees? Any insights, experiences, or pointers to deeper technical analyses would be greatly appreciated.