Personally my biggest distrust of nord comes from their ads. Most notably one where they anthromorphized a guys smart TV, Roomba and phone talking about him when he leaves the room, and others that basically totally misrepresent what a vpn does.

In short, your TV, Phone, etc… most likely share and compile information because of the ACCOUNTS they need to function. using a VPN will do NOTHING to stop google from knowing any android data, Your devices don’t hear eachother by listening to the network, which is almost all going to be encrypted protocols anyway, but by sharing accounts.

In short, I’ve always found nords comercials constantly misleading on what a VPN can and can’t protect you from, and to me it seems that’s largely so they can market them to people who don’t actually have any use for them, and worse doing it to make people feel like they are “protecting themselves” from something that they are just as vulnerable to with the vpn.

Honestly, all of these VPN companies deserve a lot of hate for having some pretty deceptive advertising and fearmongering. VPNs definitely have their uses, but the average person probably doesn’t need one… Especially not for “security” purposes.

I use a different VPN, but honestly, I wouldn’t use Nord only because of their ads and sponsorships. It’s kind of a lame excuse, but they wore me out with that.

I don’t know why others don’t like them but I personally dislike them and Express because of false advertising.

They make it seem like a vpn protects you from everything online, from hackers, phishing attacks, viruses etc and provides absolute privacy no matter what. This is not what a vpn does.

I also wonder how they can get away with marketing themselves as a way to get around geoblocking. I don’t personally mind this part but I assume it’s a legal gray area for them so they do it until they can get away with it.

None of the other answers I’m seeing are the actual reasons you shouldn’t trust more specifically. The reason you shouldn’t trust them is because a few years ago they had a data breach. It was relatively small and wouldn’t have effected many if any people but the problem was they didn’t disclose it and tried to bury it. It wasn’t found out about until a few years later. That should tell you if they had a major data breach that did affect you they would try to hide that from you and you would never know unless a you were made aware through other means.

Source: https://www.techradar.com/news/whats-the-truth-about-the-nordvpn-breach-heres-what-we-now-know

Wasn’t NordVPN that provider that said they were no log and then a hack happened and exposed that they did, in fact, retain logs of user activity? Am I mixing them up with someone else?

They store your IP, and they use it. I think that sums all up. The point of vpn is to be private, and if you’re giving up your IP to a third party, you’ve done nothing with the vpn.

My general philosophy is that anything advertised on YouTube or podcasts is automatically a scam. So I’d avoid NordVPN in favor of literally any other service just on principle. Outside of that, though all I’ve heard is the same general grumblings about price and deceptive advertising.

Fairly good (sef answered) write up here: https://torrentfreak.com/best-vpn-anonymous-no-logging/

I can’t find the document right now but NordVPN was always ranked very high on r/VPN. So I assume there is nothing wrong with using it and it’s one of the few products where the money spent on marketing didn’t influence the quality.

Or they also paid the person who maintained the ranking list.

In a nutshell – it transforms your PC/phone into a honeypot for third parties.

Well, my experience was that their shit didn’t work very well. Lots of DNS leaking despite correct setup, and customer service just shrugged it off. It did work right for a while under linux using the system’s network manager to connect to their servers directly, but over time they made it harder and harder to find their sever list by burying it deeper and deeper on their website.

Ultimately, I couldn’t use it under windows without using their client, which constantly disconnected itself and left me unprotected. It would just shut itself off. Then they went ahead and helped themselves to my money way ahead of schedule for a renewal I didn’t want, and I had to threaten them with a fraud report for several days before they caved and gave my money back.

I wasn’t happy with them selling me shit that barely worked and then stealing my money so I’d just stay instead of fighting them for a refund. Reason enough for anyone to avoid them.

Most VPN services are a sham. They just hide your network activity from your ISP, however they have full visibility in to your network traffic. Some of these VPN providers are even owned by ad agencies, but advertise privacy as a selling point. You’re better off running your own WireGuard or OpenVPN server at home or with a VPS. At least you will have control over the server and limit your exposure to unscrupulous VPN companies. (Yes using a VPS is shifting the trust from one to the other, but you will have to make a decision that is right for you.)

I’m using it right now, I didn’t know there was hate towards them. I needed a VPN, and when I was reading recent reviews, Nord seemed like the way to go for my needs. I hope I haven’t made a mistake, but after a few months now it seems fine? Fast enough for sure.

As others have said, my biggest problem with NordVPN is the dishonest ads. Other big commercial VPN providers are guilty of it, too. A VPN provides very little in the way of security. Tom Scott has a pretty good break down of the problem with VPN ads.

I also object to their pricing. They push you to commit to a 1-2 year contract. If you have a good reason to use a VPN often (like bypassing geographic restrictions) then maybe it makes sense. For me, I rarely need it. If I do want to use a VPN, I can get 30 days with Mullvad for 5 euro without signing up for a year+ commitment.