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ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

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21–30 of 175 posts

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#21
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from a waste of money. They help with things such as skipping geoblocking, able to deceive ISPs that send mail warning users about pirated content, can in some cases help with gaming ping, allow users to trick sites that rely on IP logging and many other applications besides cybersecurity and privacy. The main issue is that they all seem to advertise themselves as these privacy and cybersecurity services fir…

And no wonder! All of those things you listed as benefits sound shady and illegitimate to people who aren't very tech savvy or have a poor understanding of their rights to a free web. Notice you're using words like "Trick" and "deceive" good luck selling that!

I think VPNs are having no problems selling that, for exactly those reasons.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#22

You can use https://satoshivpn.com if you want to be anonymous. You get access to your own private server, and user registration is not even possible.

Private server? So all of your traffic comes from the same ip? That defeats the purpose of the VPN.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#23
post #12
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you want a VPN to unlock location based content?

Circumventing geoblocking is legit, but don't tell people that VPNs are about "security".

They are, it's just in very rare circumstances (monitored public wifi + possibly unsecured connection, for example). Most people should do fine and thanks to https, public wifi is far less of a threat than it used to be (plus, some started blocking VPNs).

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#24
post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

Mind you, tor had basically the same issue a while ago https://archive.is/4FMxm

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#25
post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

https://www.doineedavpn.com enumerates legitimate use cases well I think.

> This site was conceived and built by IVPN to challenge aggressive marketing practices in the VPN industry.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#26
post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

I wouldn't say commercial VPNs are waste, It depends for what purpose do you want to use the VPN. Privacy? Yeah maybe not the best for that but these are extremely useful to bypass geoblocking of content. Moreover, many ISP do not like you downloading content via torrent. How do you propose we solve it? User experience with Tor is not always the best as well. Tor network does not have lots of bandwidth, It is okay for browsing but the moment you want to download something using Tor you'd notice that its actually very slow. I'd bet my money that using Tor would attract lot more attention by your ISP than using a regular VPN.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#27
post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations.

I'm not sure what country you live in, but in the US, all the big ISPs might as well be run by the government, at least when talking about privacy. Private VPN companies are far more trustworthy, all else being equal.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#28

You can use https://satoshivpn.com if you want to be anonymous. You get access to your own private server, and user registration is not even possible.

Private server? So all of your traffic comes from the same ip? That defeats the purpose of the VPN.

The use cases for a single IP not associated with your person are numerous: avoidance of ISP retribution for your use of certain network connections (ie torrenting), avoidance of direct targeted attack, avoidance of geofencing, avoidance of censorship by IP location, as a few examples. All the better if the private static IP can be changed on demand and adjusted for location.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#29
post #2

It's been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it's a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook. If you think you want a VPN for "privacy", use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that "normal people" think they want a VPN…

> At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations.

When one party with auditors says they will protect your privacy, and the other openly spells out in their stated policies that they will run roughshod over your privacy, cataloging and trading your data as much, as long, and as insecurely as they like...

You don't have to trust the former party a lot to recognize the lesser evil.

Re: ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

#30
For any company, ask why they'd actually care about doing the right thing.

Is it reputation? Integrity? Is the reasoning purely financial?

Then ask whether the company operates in a way that suggests they'd do the profitable thing over the right thing if they think they might get away with it. Does that picture look realistic?

As an example, look at Apple. Leaving the tangential discussion about scanning iCloud photos for CSAM aside, they are a company that claims to care about users and about privacy. Whereas every other company is literally trying to send all data to the cloud, Apple is telling us they're working to process everything they can on the device itself.

What would happen if they were caught selling location data? Caught allowing companies direct access to data aggregated from users that they explicitly say they're not collecting? They'd stand to lose literally many billions of dollars of sales because the thing differentiating them from everyone else would be erased.

Which is greater - those billions of dollars of sales as a premium device maker, or those scraps of money they'd make from underhandedly selling data?

Now look at the same scenario but with Facebook, or Google - is it the same? No, because we have no realistic expectation of privacy with either company. They're in the news quite often because they're doing nefarious things, allowing access to data most people didn't even know they're collecting, yet people aren't really doing things differently because of the news.

Imagine the same with companies like ExpressVPN. How much would a disclosure hurt them? How much money could they possibly make by selling private data? Do they employ the kind of people who'd take the gamble between the two?

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