I am fully aware of what vpn services to use and not. I am not using Express VPN, I am simply doing research for a master thesis, when I came across these results from Express VPN. If you have any ideas or corrections, please let me know why a VPN provider would need to have access to these permissions.

Screenshot is from Exodus service, which let’s you view what exactly perimissions and trackers each app uses. You can check out the results and the tool for yourself here: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.expressvpn.vpn/latest/

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  • thepiguy@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I prefer mullvad. Not only is their pricing and account system much more privacy focused, they are a European (Swedish) company and are bound by the laws of my country by default. Another European one is surfshark (Dutch) which I used before. I trust mullvad more though. They also have open source clients and had no user data stored when they were raided once before.

    Edit: clarifying the reason I used surfshark. I used it back when I was in high school a few years ago, so their 3 year plan seemed like a very good price. They also supported this very obscure VPN protocol whose name I can’t remember, and my school just so happened to have forgotten to block it on their network. But I couldn’t use that protocol on Linux due to incomplete connection steps provided by surfshark, and I switched to using linux full time in the second half of my first year, so that was a waste and I just used my mobile data.