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.
Have you seen their mastodon account?
https://home.speakfree.social/@torguard
Surprised anyone in this instance would use their service since they use their social media account to more or less do NAFO posting.
That's interesting to know about, I guess. I signed up ages ago, on a lifetime $30/yr deal, so they'd have to do something genuinely evil for me to consider some service that's 2-4x the price.