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Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

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Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#171

Post by VonGuard »

VonGuard wrote: post #6

Been saying it for YEARS: 95% of VPNs sell your data. It's where they make their money. It's absolutely insane the push-back I get when I say this online. I get downvoted to hell and back. Source: I bought this data from VPN companies... Hell, you can inject ads and surveys if you want!

And look! I am downvoted again!

How does this work? They harvest your DNS! They inject surveys into your YouTube packets. They tabulate just how much traffic goes to which specific games on Twitch. How? The provider is the endpoint, not you.

It's not the whole picture, but it's enough to sell to marketers.

This is what happens EVERY time I say this! Look again! It happened, I have 1 upvote... It's almost as if the VPN companies don't want you to believe this is true!

Story time! I have been cashed out of three startups. $600 total, across them all. It's the people in the Valley who've struck out over and over who know the truth, not the successes.

One of those startups was about tracking the games played on Twitch, and selling that info to Esports entities, marketing firms, etc. The company did not succeed because, honestly, it's not hard data to scrape yourself. BUT, we tried. And where did we get our data? VPN providers. Major VPN providers. We don't care about your personal data. We care about whether you watched a Twitch stream of GTA or Madden.

And for a time, yes, we could buy injected surveys. Packets, literally injected into your streams of data. This was expensive, iffy, and controversial, but it was on the rate cards.

DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info. Stop putting your heads in the sand. Ya'll have seriously lost the path.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#172

Post by mjbale116 »

Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there?

It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity.

From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd.

Isn't Tor as safe as it can get when surfing the web?

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#173

Post by nerdsniper »

wraptile wrote: post #139
nerdsniper wrote: post #91

Note that all of these companies are also under the umbrella of Tesonet, a Lithuanian VC firm also headed by Tomas Okmanas (Tom Okman in TFA). Their flagship investments are Nord Security, Hostinger, Oxylabs, Surfshark, Decodo, Mediatech, and nexos.ai - all closely related business models around proxying. They don't seem to have Russian ties: "In 2022, CyberCare opened an office in Lviv, Ukraine. Although planning fo…

I used to work at Tesonet (as software engineer) and I'm not familiar with corporate politics / ownerships but they're lovely people that would 100% walk out if there were some real Russian ties involved. Lithuania is a really small country and IT has been a huge economic strategy since early 00s as a way to become economically independent specifically because of Russia and it worked out really well.

I have a good friend from Lithuania, who has told me so many amazing/wonderful/superlative things about the country he grew up in and loves very dearly, as well as its people. I can't wait to visit someday. Unfortunately, he only has Russian and American citizenship, so he can't purchase real estate there currently, but luckily most of Lithuania's restrictions have been very common-sense (applying only to people who frequently travel between Russia and Lithuania).

From what I can tell, Tesonet seems like a very patriotic group (as much as a corporation can be personified at all), and genuinely puts resources, both human and financial, towards raising up the local communities.

It's interesting to me that Tesonet has concentrated the most popular VPNs under one roof and is involved in so many companies that could be described as "dual-use" (white hat/black hat) such as residential/mobile proxies, ai-powered scraping, etc. It tells me that Tesonet has a very sharp understanding of gray-hat landscapes. It does seem like their portfolio could be leveraged as a valuable asset to any powerful interest, regardless if they are benevolent or malicious or misguided.

I mentioned Tesonet's stance towards Ukraine because Lithuania has a number of wealthy ex-soviet/Russian citizens and business-owners with differing politics, and wanted to clarify that for any readers who might wonder.

Additionally, I've always been very impressed with Estonia's digital infrastructure and Ukrainian software engineering - not just JetBrains but also other vendors that I've worked with personally. Seems like there are a lot of highly skilled people concentrated in your region.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#174

Post by nerdsniper »

qmr wrote: post #170
rasengan wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not sell PIA. I entered into a merger agreement to create a publicly owned privacy company. Without getting into detail, I left the company on principle receiving only 1/3rd of the value for the shares.

Why?

"Without getting into detail"

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#175

Post by kachapopopow »

mjbale116 wrote: post #172

Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there? It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity. From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd. Isn't Tor as safe as…

vpns are marketed as hiding you from less trustworthy companies or accessing region locked content.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#176

Post by tsunagatta »

mjbale116 wrote: post #172

Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there? It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity. From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd. Isn't Tor as safe as…

From my understanding, they have different purposes. VPNs aren’t really about safety or anonymity, Tor is the way to go for those. VPNs are for if you don’t want your ISP specifically to see your traffic for some reason, or if you want your traffic to appear like it’s coming from a different geographical location with minimal latency hit.

Edit: I should say, VPNs as a technology have far more applications than this, e.g. for accessing a secure intranet, but these are just the reasons you’d theoretically want to use a VPN service like Nord/Mullvad/etc.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#177

Post by webstrand »

mjbale116 wrote: post #172

Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there? It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity. From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd. Isn't Tor as safe as…

VPNs are for when you want to obfuscate your traffic from your ISP, not the government. By passing your traffic through a private company _somewhere else_ to another private entity that has some vested interest in not reselling your data, you can prevent it from being easily mapped back to you.

Also VPN is generally much faster and higher bandwidth than TOR.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#178

Post by 8cvor6j844qw_d6 »

mjbale116 wrote: post #172

Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there? It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity. From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd. Isn't Tor as safe as…

Tor is unbearably slow for daily general use.

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#179

Post by [deleted] »

mjbale116 wrote: post #172

Can someone explain to me why should I use a VPN when Tor is out there? It just seems to me odd that one would pipe their communications through a private company, that operates over a jurisdiction when said jurisdiction can compel the company in actions that may compromise my anonymity. From my perspective, its like shifting my trust from my ISP (an entity with way more oversight) to a pvt ltd. Isn't Tor as safe as…

[deleted]

Re: Who owns Express VPN, Nord, Surfshark? VPN relationships explained (2024)

#180

Post by dartharva »

hansvm wrote: post #52
hemabe wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany (and probably in the UK too), you now have to be very careful about what you write online. There is actually a section 188 that makes insulting, defaming, or slandering people in political life a criminal offense. You can now face heavy fines for minor insults (“idiot”) or even have your home searched. A VPN can be useful here.

What idiot signed that bullshit into law?

This is actually not uncommon in most of the world. American 1A is actually an extremely novel concept most other countries still haven't caught up on.
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