Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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When a service advertise as 100% open source, do you expect the website to be open-source too? (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Long title, wopsi.

Recently been checking out PIA VPN service(for research purposes), and they advertise their services to be 100% open source. However when checking their Github they don't seem to have their code base for website there.

So this have had me wondering, when you hear the term 100% open source. Do you expect ALL of what they do, including website part, to be open source? Or just the application / service that they offer?

Lemmyknow your thoughts!

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (6 children)

It's pretty common for companies like that to advertise that their app is 100% open source, but then stop short of guaranteeing anything beyond that. In PIA's case, I would point out that their infrastructure (the servers that they use to route your traffic) are closed, so they could be doing literally anything in there. Their desktop client being open source doesn't actually do much to guarantee your privacy.

If you want real transparency, Mullvad is the only real option: https://mullvad.net/en/help/open-source

Having said that, I personally use PIA because it's cheaper and I don't care enough.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Mullvad website isnt open source (https://github.com/mullvad/mullvadvpn-app/issues/5392)

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