Re:PIA: Our Merger with Kape Technologies – Addressing Your ...
by dvosar34 on Wednesday November 27, 2019 @10:05AM
(#21648406)
You come off rather imperious in your comments here. Between the number of "I" self-references in your first post, to this saccharine checklist that is more show-off than informative.
As usual, I think the reaction of PIA's corporate restructuring is a lot of hot air over nothing. Typical of most hot air, it is released to draw attention to the source and not convey any real concern.
There are a few other people on this post who are recommending specific VPNs, and you can (and should) look through some of their justifications for why they like their providers. A couple of things you can look into if you want to know where to start:
- What technologies are they using, contributing to, etc? Do they have a good rapport with Open Source communities?
- Do they support OpenVPN/wireguard? I advocate against using a custom VPN client, I don't want my provider to ever touch my computer, only my traffic.
- What's their privacy policy look like? Do they make public commitments to destroy logs? Are their claims on-their-face absurd? There's no such thing as a VPN that does zero logging at all, so if someone is claiming perfect anonymity, I distrust them from the get-go.
- Have they had data breaches in the past (for example, NordVPN)?
- Are there any high-profile cases of them refusing to provide logs to someone?
- What country are they located in? Depending on the country, a foreign VPN can complicate collusion efforts.
- Do they pay for ads, and how do they advertise? Do they make inaccurate guarantees about what a VPN can and can't do? A VPN isn't going to protect you from the police, and a VPN on its own will not make you private, so I distrust companies that make those claims.
- Do they seem competent? Do they have instructions on how to deal with things like DNS leaks, or how to set up killswitches?
That's not an exhaustive list. It is absolutely a pain to determine trust -- this is the biggest problem with 3rd-party VPNs. Don't go crazy with it; a VPN is just one layer in your privacy setup, so it's OK to have something imperfect. Don't aim for perfect privacy, aim for "better than what I currently have."