> As far as I know, in a lot of country (like France) it is a legal obligation to keep logs and be able to identify one of your customer if the police demands it.
Not for all types of services. ISPs are sometimes under obligation to log, but VPN services don't belong in that category.
I can't speak for others but we have contacts with legal experts (in a few jurisdictions) that alert us to changing laws. Ultimately if a country required us to start logging we would just cancel all of our machines there and leave.
On the topic of trustworthiness, you are completely right of course that VPN users put a lot of trust in their VPN provider. There is also the lemon market aspect - the information and competence asymmetry between user and operator. That begs the question of how to ascertain trustworthiness.
I would love to use Mullvad, but I need split tunneling on a per-process basis (Windows), since there is the occasional website that hates VPN-based servers. I have a special browser installation I use for such occasions, but few VPN providers offer per-process VPN exceptions. Any chance Mullvad is considering this feature?
Have you considered running a SOCKS proxy outside of Mullvad (ie on a Raspberry Pi or in the cloud?)
You could then use Firefox Multi-Account Containers to bind a container to the SOCKS proxy, and whenever you need to access a site that doesn’t support a VPN you can just open it with in said container.
Not for all types of services. ISPs are sometimes under obligation to log, but VPN services don't belong in that category.
I can't speak for others but we have contacts with legal experts (in a few jurisdictions) that alert us to changing laws. Ultimately if a country required us to start logging we would just cancel all of our machines there and leave.
On the topic of trustworthiness, you are completely right of course that VPN users put a lot of trust in their VPN provider. There is also the lemon market aspect - the information and competence asymmetry between user and operator. That begs the question of how to ascertain trustworthiness.
We think things like this help:
https://mullvad.net/blog/2018/10/17/signals-trustworthy-vpns...
https://mullvad.net/blog/2019/6/3/system-transparency-future...