Obscura VPN launches Circle of Trust with Ente Photos as first partner
Obscura VPN has launched its Circle of Trust partner network, naming encrypted photo app Ente Photos as the first member and offering paid subscribers 25% off their first year.
Obscura said subscribers claim the discount by opening the "friends" section of their account dashboard on the provider's website and generating a unique promo code. The company did not detail the terms of the reciprocal offer available to Ente users.
Circle of Trust is presented as a curated network of trusted, privacy-centric applications. Obscura said it is choosing to promote outside companies that share its stance on user data protection rather than building a set of in-house tools to lock customers into a single brand. The company pointed to a similar move by Windscribe earlier this year, which set up an ecosystem of privacy-first apps it does not own.
Ente Photos is an open-source, end-to-end encrypted alternative to mainstream cloud storage such as Google Photos and Apple iCloud. According to the company, images and videos are encrypted on the user's device before they reach the cloud, so nobody, including Ente's own developers, can view them. The service supports multiple platforms and offers family plans.
Obscura VPN describes itself as a relatively new provider built on a two-party relay architecture and a custom QUIC-based obfuscation protocol. Traffic enters through an Obscura server, which sees the originating IP address but cannot read the encrypted traffic, and exits through an entirely independent node operated by Mullvad. Because the two entities do not share data, Obscura says it is structurally impossible for a single company to log both a user's connection source and their online activity. The provider recently arrived on Windows and Android, allows payment through Bitcoin's Lightning Network or Monero alongside conventional methods, and said it has passed its first independent audit.