they were all owned by the same company and sold to Kape, which has ties to the Israeli intelligence service, a few years back.
The issue is who he sold it to -- the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users' browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
I personally use perfect-privacy, which didn't turn up any red flags when I did research a few years ago. it's a little lacking in features but openvpn isn't that hard to set up on linux & android. no clue how well their desktop app works.
Mullvad is what I use, haven't heard of any controversies with them.
I used to use Mullvad but switched because PIA was cheaper and a looooot of sites and apps were blocking me when I used Mullvad.
Fuck you Wendys I don’t want to turn off my VPN on work wifi just to order food
Seconding Mullvad, you can send them an envelope of cash or buy a code off amazon if you really care about it that much. Technically they're in a 14 eyes country but no one here is important enough to worry about that.
The only problem is that they don't support port forwarding, so if you're a serious torrent person that can be disqualifying.
I torrent with mullvad, it seeds fine.
But it would seed better with port forwarding, as all VPNs would. Which is the point.