At this point, the VPN industry is so rife with shady dealings, suspicious ownership structures, weird exits, questionable marketing/PR practices/pushes, and rumours that waters have been muddied sufficiently for every provider out there. It might have been by design as well. Who knows.
I now believe that you know your use case and use VPN only for that, and decide whether you really need to pay with parts of your kidneys for a service that claims to be the "uber privacy bulwark of the season" (until proven otherwise, as it happens), and get done with it, and make sure "anonymity and privacy" are not the expectations unless you have gone to great lengths to ensure these two, and if that's the case, you won't be in the market for "list most private VPNs providers" at a search or LLM input box.
If your needs are anonymity, a VPN is not going to solve it— in fact, relying on one might endanger you. Even for privacy, I'd be very careful in trusting a VPN (any VPN).
So if you need a VPN for streaming content from other geographies, just get the one at the best cost that does the job well in your geography, without going through the rabbit hole of cryptographic verification, reputation spiral, etc.
A VPN is always a risk. Still, there is a difference between using Mulvad or PrivateInternetAccess. The difference between risking that the service might do bad things with your data, and having high certainty that it does. And this article gives pretty good indications which category each service belongs to
Yes. Very much so. PIA was purchased by a British-Israeli corporation called Kape Inc. which has been a known bad-actor in the past and is a giant red flag when looking for VPN options. (edited away the brevity)
Not saying that this is what I do, but a VPN is useful for things that are illegal but not serious.
For example, France is spying torrent downloads of copyrighted content but they only look at the domestic consumer ISP IP addresses. They ignore all foreign IPs, so if you're using a VPN it doesn't matter if the VPN keeps all the logs they won't bother.
Of course if you're doing things that will get you personally targeted by the police, like cyber-bullying or CSAM, a VPN won't protect you.
Yeah, agreed. Most VPNs just move the trust boundary from your ISP to another opaque network and call it privacy. There’s no way to verify what’s running, who controls it, or what happens to your data once it leaves your machine.
We solve this with vp.net, by making the service verifiable. The code can be reviewed, the builds are reproducible, and each node can prove what software it’s running and where your traffic actually goes [1].
It doesn’t turn a VPN into an anonymity tool, but it makes trust measurable instead of blind. That’s the part the industry should have fixed a long time ago.
I now believe that you know your use case and use VPN only for that, and decide whether you really need to pay with parts of your kidneys for a service that claims to be the "uber privacy bulwark of the season" (until proven otherwise, as it happens), and get done with it, and make sure "anonymity and privacy" are not the expectations unless you have gone to great lengths to ensure these two, and if that's the case, you won't be in the market for "list most private VPNs providers" at a search or LLM input box.
If your needs are anonymity, a VPN is not going to solve it— in fact, relying on one might endanger you. Even for privacy, I'd be very careful in trusting a VPN (any VPN).
So if you need a VPN for streaming content from other geographies, just get the one at the best cost that does the job well in your geography, without going through the rabbit hole of cryptographic verification, reputation spiral, etc.