Abandoned Warrant Canary. What is going on with Perfect Privacy?

[PL89 2]

I know it might seem a bit weird that a freshly joined member starts a discussion about a competitor. But I want to point out that I have no negative feelings for Perfect Privacy. I have been using them for a while. But there is something going on there that should concern us all.

Perfect Privacy is a Germany based VPN provider that has been around for a while. In the past, they have proven more than once that they don't keep any logs and they also had a good reputation with people doing not so nice things. It was a common thing that one third of their servers have been down. But recently, something changed. They stopped updating their Warrant Canary in April. They have a forum too, but their staff entirely ignores this Warrant Canary topic. They refuse to comment on this matter. People told them they will leave if they don't update it. Others suggested they should just remove it if they don't bother updating it.

Now if you think about it:
If your users complain and even stop using your service, what could be a logical reason not to update the Warrant Canary? How much time would it take to do this? 3 months have passed by. At times, half their servers are down. IKEV2 is not working anymore because of some certificate error. They know about it. They say they are working on it. Even thought roughly half their servers are down or broken, their bandwidth at times see roughly around 10% usage. Unfortunately their forums is mostly in Germany. They had users defending this service for years. But now everyone and really everyone turned against the service and yet they don't seem to care.

Can someone here come up with a reason why a service will suddenly stop updating the Warrant Canary and stop fixing things at the same time? For me, this sounds really bad.

Talking about Perfect Privacy, they compare to services like Mullvad, AirVPN and IVPN. They have a very good reputation around privacy minded people.

For me, this just sounds authorities prevent them from updating or removing it. I simply can not come up with any other explanation.

Maybe you can.

[MrNull 0]

Former Perfect Privacy customer here. I stopped using the service around November of last year after half their servers went down while they acted completely in-transparent about it. Verbiage like "Which problems are you talking about?! We're as fantastic and safe as ever." have become the norm despite endless problems: 50% of the advertised servers are never working, defunct IKVE2 profiles, an unfinished client that feels like a stuck beta, barely any support, etc.pp. The only person keeping the service seem like a still maintained project is  the mod " PP Christian ".

I honestly have no idea what is going on over there but I started to dig a bit deeper. A friend of mine is part of the Chaos Computer Club. I asked him about his opinion because I knew he had been using the service in the past and he responded that they most likely ran into some trouble with the German authorities last year which resulted in some data centers handing them a notice and canceling the server subscriptions. At the same time, it seems like the team of Perfect Privacy  has disbanded and the service is now entirely run by the company's director D., his wife and maybe a few others. I think it's not entirely far-fetched to assume that the account PP Christian is actually run by D..  

There are lot of conspiracies floating around the forums. PP being taken over by the police as a honey pot, or the team having sold the service and therefore can't update the warrant canary but honestly, I think the other assumptions are far more realistic. They have lost their primary partners and are less staff which results in less customers, less money and less options to change that -- a vicious cycle that will lead to he service's downfall.

Regarding the warrant canary, I think people are putting way too much weight into it. In the end it's just a notification that guarantees that the service is still acting independently, it's never a guarantee against state level players like law enforcement and people shouldn't be so naive to believe that.

[OpenSourcerer 1487]

On 7/6/2025 at 10:19 PM, MrNull said:

Regarding the warrant canary, I think people are putting way too much weight into it. In the end it's just a notification that guarantees that the service is still acting independently, it's never a guarantee against state level players like law enforcement and people shouldn't be so naive to believe that.

Besides, I can simply forget updating it and everyone will lose their minds. Real risk to a business.