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.
Any body know of any good ones that use wireguard? I have PIA (didn't do anything I needed to be actually secure on fortunately) since I get amazing performance with wire guard vs openvpn, or least it seems to be a lot less picky when the underlying connection is weird or unreliable.
Also, for anyone who needs to hear it, a VPN alone will not protect you and you shouldn't use both at the same time unless you know what you're doing and the security consequences.
I don't think wireguard is recommended yet for privacy reasons, but mullvad has always been solid AFAIK. You can even pay in cash if you like.
The other reply is correct about wireguard and privacy. If you have concerns about the connection to the vpn server being traced back to you, don’t use wireguard.
Wireguard uses perfect forward secrecy, which means that no one can see the private keys and none of your information is ever revealed to a man in the middle. A man in the middle would, though, be able to see that a connection was made between the vpn server and your ip.
It’s worth investigating why that would be a concern and I’ll outline an example here:
You connect your computer to the vpn and go do some stuff. Unbeknownst to you, someone’s been packet sniffing the vpn server you use for along ass time and has accumulated enough information to say for certainty that you were connected right before the stuff was done. Based on recent examples, that’s enough to get a warrant!
How would you mitigate that? Key and server rotation! For example, if you created a wireguard config for a bunch of vpn servers and switched them up from time to time and/or deleted your old config and made a new one with a new key. Easy peasy.
There’s a good overview of some of the problems wireguard can face here. Some of them are shared by other protocols and some are much different than what we’re talking about. Generally though wireguard is very good and almost all concerns are alleviated by key/server rotation.