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.
Kaspersky was at least at one point a resold version of hotspot.
here’s an article that has a lot of details.
Hotspot isn’t exactly in the best situation to be a vpn you’d trust if you were worried about law enforcement.
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That’s a good way to evaluate lots of stuff.
One way that kaspersky might not be safe enough for you, if it’s still a rebrand of hotspot which I haven’t confirmed, is that hotspot has offices in states where they can be compelled to install equipment and software to monitor throughput without notifying customers. That’s no big deal for Russians and Syrians because they’re still protected from those states actions by a bunch of layers of international law and whatnot. If you aren’t safe from, for example, the us government because you, for example, live in the us then it might not be the protection appropriate for you and your uses.
It’s one of those circumstances where at the very least a warrant canary would be good, but would also only provide certain assurances and would rely on the users awareness to function.
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