I discovered that I can have Mullvad activated at the same time as ProtonVPN, while Proton is running from the Firefox extension. I’m on Linux.

When I look up my IP and location, the one that shows up is Proton’s, and Mullvad doesn’t detect itself on its website.

My questions are:

  1. Are all my programs running through Mullvad, except Firefox?
  2. Can websites get confused because of the conflicting information?
  3. I was just playing around, but does this have any practical utility?

Thank you all in advance!

  • stinermanEnglish
    19·
    3 days ago

    It’s a VPN within a VPN. So all your traffic over the Mullvad VPN connection has a VPN within it going to Proton (but only for Firefox).

    To answer the questions directly:

    1. Yes, but not exactly. Everything goes through Mullvad, but Firefox goes through Proton going through Mullvad.
    2. No, they’ll just see the Proton information.
    3. It slows down your connection! That’s a lot more extra hops. Practically…I suppose if the “inner VPN” was necessary to connect to a specific host (like a work VPN) then it could be useful. For example you use Mullvad on your router, but your work laptop uses a VPN to connect to resources needed to do your work. Other than that I can’t see why you’d need to use 2 at the same time.
    • howler@lemmy.zipOP
      5·
      3 days ago

      This is so interesting. Indeed my connection was slower, and I don’t need both VPNs, so thank you very much for your nice answer!

      I had never thought about connecting the router to a VPN… That could be an entertaining experiment for another day.