191–200 of 381 posts
What do people use these VPN services for? Is it mostly for pirating, or public wifi users, or people that don't want their ISPs to know what they're doing? It all seems like niche use cases.
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Online gambling is not in any way built on eroding privacy. You are free to not like how the industry knowingly makes money of off addicts (no, no matter how much they say they care about responsible gambling they will not stop problem gamblers more than necessary to comply with the law), but in my opinion that is the only ethics problem online gambling has that most other industries do not also share.
Start here (from Simon Davies, the founder of Privacy International): http://www.privacysurgeon.org/blog/incision/how-the-online-g... They are as bad as, and often indistinguishable from, the least salubrious corners of online advertising in their tracking and data gathering. Unfortunately their determination to keep feeding off addicts and keep tracking the whales is what has driven their data abuses. Responsible ga…
> It is routine for sites to demand the transmission of passport and credit card scans, drivers licenses, utility bills and other personal documents. All the available evidence indicates that this information is stored permanently.
Only due to the regulating authorities demanding this to prevent money laundering. Collecting and storing this information is just a huge headache to the gambling companies. I know some small companies do it improperly, but if they could chose themselves they would not have stored it at all. I have never heard of any company using this KYC documents for anything other than storing them for possible police investigations.
> As a rule, they don’t. It is extremely difficult to close an online gambling account, and in my experience impossible to have your data deleted.
This kind of BS with making it hard to close accounts was an issue and has been cracked down on. These days it is very easy to permanently close a gambling account if it is Malta or UK regulated at least. If it is not then you can report them and they can get large fines. It is impossible to get your data deleted though since the casino must keep it for anti-money laundering for a long time. Here I do not know how many actually delete anything once their legal time is up.
> [and] fail to notify customers that personal data will be retained permanently even after an arduous process of account closure.”
Yeah, I think the sites should be more clear about this. But I do not know of any industry which does this well.
Edit: About tracking the whales. No, that is not related to any data abuses as far as I can think of. It would actually be better (from a greedy and selfish point of view) for us if we could delete the gambler's data when they delete their account because then they can register a new account and lose all their money again and we could say we have fulfilled our responsible gambling obligations because there was no way we could correlate the new account with the deleted. Tracking whales is usually mostly done with quite simple BI queries and VIP teams doing work manually.
I am not saying data abuses do not happen in the industry, but it is certainly not built around them or close to as bad as e.g. adtech. Actually ordinary online stores seem often to be worse than casinos when it comes to privacy which probably says more about our current society than about casinos.
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Mullvad on the other hand does not log anything at all (other than their Stripe payments where they try to keep data minimal). Is that in violation of the Swedish law? Maybe, but as long as one of the medium sized ISPs, Bahnhof, is still fighting the law in court I cannot foresee any court cases against small fry like Mullvad or any of the other Swedish VPN providers.
The difference is probably that Sweden isn't as privacy unfriendly as the USA, despite being part of the fourteen eyes programme.
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Thank you for taking time to explain your position. I can appreciate the need for resources and why you think this deal is the right thing to do for your company. I've trusted you company enough to use it for years and buy a multi-year subscription. Unfortunately, given the track record of Kape, I can't trust the bundle of Kape+PIA the way I trusted PIA alone. Maybe in the following years this trust will be accumulat…
If you think a platform is responsible for what their developers do with it, then I understand. However, Kape was never directly involved in adware other than providing SDKs that let developers create positive and negative things. To say Kape was involved in adware would be akin to saying the Wright Bros killed millions of people - because they made planes which people used to kill people (which is simply untrue). Ev…
To me this sounds like if people used Ionic or React Native to make spammy crappy apps and then people blamed those frameworks respectively. It wouldn't make any sense. It's the fault of the app developers or the platforms which distribute the app (e.g. the app store)
Am I missing something here? Did CrossRider have a storefront which actively promoted adware extensions? I'm not able to find anything rationally explaining the amount of backlash and downvoting rasengan is getting.
This article and articles like this miscast Kape in an incorrect light. To be clear, in the past the company was known as CrossRider and provided a developer SDK that could be used to integrate with browsers. Unfortunately, CrossRider didn't do enough to prevent malware (like platforms these days and their fake news) and the platform was used by some bad people for bad purposes. When the new management team of CrossR…
correct. Focusing on the founder's alleged ties is a distraction. The real story story is "all VPN's are snake oil". The fact that he peddles this should really stand for itself (regardless of his backstory).
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The idea of suing a shell corp of an intelligence agency for breach of contract seems laughable. Maybe they aren't that, but why should anybody without personal knowledge of the situation trust that they aren't? This is the sort of scenario where 'better safe than sorry' overrules giving the benifit of the doubt.
That is a great question - all of our information is public whereas most other VPN companies go out of their way to hide where they are located and who they are. Verification and transparency are more important than trust.
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>The merger between Kape and PIA affords PIA the resources needed to bring privacy to the mainstream. You were one of the most, if not the most successful VPN provider for years. Did you really need more resources? For what? The main benefit of PIA is the expectation for extra privacy. No matter how you look at it, selling to Kape is a strong signal that's not a priority. Similar, for hiring Karpeles to do your secur…
> Did you really need more resources? For what? Yes, to bring freedom thru privacy to people, The coming battle against privacy and free speech is by far the strongest and worst yet; the narrative and our voices are quickly getting quashed. Without the ability to communicate privately and speak freely, at best democracy is at risk; and at worst, humanity, or what it has meant to be human until now, itself may be at r…
> ... bring freedom thru privacy to people, The coming battle against privacy and free speech ...
the claims you make are not only misleading but outright dangerous to anyone who actually needs strong privacy.
This article and articles like this miscast Kape in an incorrect light. To be clear, in the past the company was known as CrossRider and provided a developer SDK that could be used to integrate with browsers. Unfortunately, CrossRider didn't do enough to prevent malware (like platforms these days and their fake news) and the platform was used by some bad people for bad purposes. When the new management team of CrossR…
Per this research from Google and other academics [1][2], Crossrider was one of the largest "affiliates" of Superfish and other ad-injector malware.
To my understanding, Crossrider was essentially a distributor: they delivered installs, recruited advertisers, and brokered deals with software publishers, knowing that they would be adding malware/adware to the downloaded bundles that would persist on users' machines. And knowing that some users (most or all, really) didn't realize what was happening.
Rather than being a mere bystander, if the researchers are correct and per the HN thread below [3], Crossrider was an active--and essential--participant in the "Download Valley" ecosystem.
It may or may not be relevant to today's Kape, but we should at least be honest about what these guys were doing in the past. It was ugly. They weren't the only ones, but they were clearly not on the side of the angels. (Worse, YC funded one of their competitors called InstallMonetizer.)
[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8914/94e6d2a9e96985ccca1c44...
[2] https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2015/papers-archived/6949...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9120593
(edit: spacing)