I don't find this credible whatsoever, and I think you should stop making this claim.

The only piece of evidence in your linked comment is the now defunct blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20200629163107/https://vpnscam.c...

In addition to reading like it was written by an angry 12 year old, it makes some enormous logical leaps. The facts given are that Proton has an official legal entity in Lithuania called PROTONVPN LT, UAB, and another company called Tesonet shared Lithuanian offices and apparently some business services with them. The article claims that Tesonet is a "data mining company" based on the following evidence:

> Tesonet has its hands in “Machine Learning Solution, cybersecurity, and collection of business intelligence data” in efforts to create algorithms, that best suit their client business needs. If you read their about page, the company openly states it employs many different technologies to structure data, which is run on various services like MySQL, Anisble, collectd, StatsD, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Influx DB, Python, and Couchbase.

> ALL of these names rely on HEAVY USER INFORMATION, which makes sense, considering that Tesonet is a DATA MINING company. Now, let us not forget that Lithuania itself is a NATO member that regularly holds NAZI marches.

Let's just say that I'm not immediately convinced that Tesonet is in the business of selling user data.

The article also claims that in one online Lithuanian business services directory, the CEO of Tesonet was listed as the head of PROTONVPN LT, UAB. I have no idea of the legitimacy of this claim, but it stretches plausibility to claim that Proton is secretly not a Swiss company and secretly has a Lithuanian data mining company CEO as its head.

The article then goes on to make some completely unsupported allegations: "the real question is not whether ProtonVPN is working with Tesonet, but if the provider is owned by the data mining company" and "Under the name of a FREE VPN service, they’ve been collecting USER DATA all along."

Furthermore, the original source of most of this information actually comes from a Hacker News comment. The article links to a comment by the head of Private Internet Access! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203

Unfortunately this gives the game away, because the comment is "retracted and removed by author's request". Dang comments:

> In addition to the redacting the above comment, we deleted several comments below by request of their authors. My understanding is that the dispute has been resolved and that the allegations are retracted.

In other words, it appears to me that the true source of these rumors has retracted them and no longer believes that Proton has the claimed ties to Tesonet.

Ironically, as a result of looking into this, I feel slightly more confident about ProtonVPN than I did previously.

Edited to add: you're also stretching even the blog post's unsupported allegations in your comment, when you say that ProtonVPN is "white-labeled" Nord. The article makes the unsupported insinuation that ProtonVPN and Nord are both owned by Tesonet, but this is different from the claim that ProtonVPN is just Nord repackaged as a different product, as you claim here.

> In other words, it appears to me that the true source of these rumors has retracted them and no longer believes that Proton has the claimed ties to Tesonet.

I was nodding along, until this.

Seeing someone retract a pretty specific claim like that by calling on the admins to delete, instead of leaving it up for posterity and/or and discussing how they made the error, feels more like a legal threat was received, and some pants were shat.