PIA received 2 court orders, 12 subpoenas, and 3 warrants. For all of these government demands for user data, there were no logs produced and so nothing for PIA to turn over. Having said that, if and when PIA ever changes its policy and starts producing logs, they will be legally compelled to turn them over to US authorities when demanded.
PIA is somewhat overdue on the latest TR, but an updated one should be out this month.
This is good news. However, in the case of ProtonMail, they were forced to log. I wonder if PIA gets into a situation where the government forces them to log. I don’t believe this has happened in a high publicity case yet, although we can’t rule out the possibility of mandated logging via gag orders.
PIA received 2 court orders, 12 subpoenas, and 3 warrants. For all of these government demands for user data, there were no logs produced and so nothing for PIA to turn over.
That’s all that matters for the most part for a VPN. Those that recommend other VPN services need to show court documents that prove no logs. IDGAF what any service “promises”. Either show court documents proving no logs or GTFO.
I’m not a fan of auto-renewals either… To the point that I really wish things like defaulting to auto-renewal by opt-out (e.g. user has to turn it OFF rather than enabling it) and offering “discounts” for it - e.g. marketing spin for charging you more if you don’t want it - (which IIRC Comcast does) were made illegal by law. I don’t view PIA as any better or worse in this department… MANY, MANY business do this and some people like the option but I don’t think users should ever be in pressured into it.
One thing you can do is look into “one-time account numbers” or “virtual account numbers” (the terminology varies slightly)… That way, the initial payment will work but the auto-renew payment will auto-fail unless you specifically add a new one-time card. There are a few services and at least 1-2 credit card companies that offer these (Citi and BOA should have it unless something changed… Discover used to but no longer does. Chase added something like this but I don’t know the details if it works exactly the same). I’ve always been a fan of the concept mostly bc it gives me some protection against auto-renewals. Just make sure to read how it works, cuz IIRC some of them are really “one vendor” cc numbers instead of “one transaction” cc numbers.
From what I can tell looking more into crossrider…it was a browser extension interoperability platform for developers, which they sold to some devs who used it for ad injection, and then Google got mad cuz it was taking away ad revenue so they labeled the software “adware”. The company seems to had nothing to do with what it was being used for, but the software had the name of the company “crossrider” so it got associated… and even then that “malware” is a far cry from spyware or ransomware or some actually sketchy shit. So when people that try to paint it as some awful malware company they probably have ulterior motives (like this guy who is clearly a nordvpn affiliate)… notice how he’s bashing his affiliate reviewing competition…
You’re aware that PIA has a Graphical Linux client, right? And its code is on GitHub? And that they also provide ovpn files so you can set it up yourself on openvpn/networkmanager yourself if you’re so inclined (or if you’re on an unsupported distro like Fedora)… right?
I’ve heard good things about Mullvad too but from my experience PIA is still solid, safe, and trustworthy. Happy to consider revising my opinion if you can show me non-FUD reasons why I should doubt them but so far I’ve only seen FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt).
Instead of pointing at marketing things that they’re doing that I should cancel over, give me some product related issues that you feel I should cancel over. Specifically the product. Why should I cancel?
Or… #3 it’s a growing company that’s trying to capture market share. Like that’s business bro. I don’t know why people always jump on the ‘these sketchy fuckers’ bandwagon. Oh wait. Yes I do. Because things like this get clicks…just like the article above.
This is what sooooooo many companies do. The fact that they have a few websites doesn’t mean much. They aren’t going to get techradar or pcmag (which also owns several vpns) or CNET or whatever. And this guy who wrote the article is a nordvpn shill…now nord is a sketchy company no one knows anything about. Kape is open af, which is veeerrry rare in this industry.
Do you realize how many VPN providers are really out there? They’d have to buy up a lot more than what they have for me to consider it a monopoly.
I’ve used PIA and Nord and consider Nord to be the shadier of the two by far… Yet Nord seems to be more heavily promoted on the vast majority of vpn “review” sites out there (bc most vpn review sites are garbage)
PIA states all this publicly, but I haven’t searched for court records that could corroborate these claims. I imagine the 2 court orders are in the public domain…not sure about the subpoenas or warrants though.
Ideally, these transparency reports would be produced by an independent third-party and include references to court records but that may be asking too much.
You’re aware that PIA has a Graphical Linux client, right?
Yeah that’s why I’m changing to Mullvad now, because PIA was the only one had a linux client before.
I’m not sure about this new ownership and reading this I really prefer their owners over PIAs:
Daniel Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg will continue to own 50% each of the shares.
No further contribution of capital or new issue of shares is expected to be necessary.
Our investment horizon is “to plant trees in the shade of which we will never sit”.
Mullvad's vision is to make censorship and mass surveillance impractical.
Mullvad shall strive to act in accordance with its cultural pillars of trustworthiness, transparency, and trailblazing.
Owners’ restriction on board and CEO: honesty, especially in marketing.
Also the Sydney PIA server is really terrible, I can barely ever use it so I use the Melbourne one, but Mullvad has one in Brisbane which is even better
edit: Aaaaaaaaaand I can’t access warcraftlogs right now because they’ve banned PIA’s IPs
So, I need a VPN for one single linux container that doesn’t have a GUI. I was already a PIA subscriber when I set up this container, so I tried connecting it to the PIA servers and I never really got a stable connection. I eventually tried the Mullvad client and it worked right away and has been super stable. I let my multi-year PIA subscription lapse last week.
Nord is the only company with a larger market share… However Nord doesn’t doesn’t own nearly every VPN after that market share wise and their lead has been shrinking fast. Way too busy to do the math on this one but I’m fairly sure if you add up the market share for all of the Kape owned VPNs they have already passed Nord. You can have a monopoly and still have large competition, just ask Microsoft how their cases have gone in the past.
Nord is very sketchy and I’m not a huge fan of what they are doing as well but it’s still less sketchy then being owned by a company that was known for literally doing the opposite of protecting privacy just a few years back and is acting like this. You really have to do some hardcore fanboying to see Nord as worse of the two evils here at this point and yes I am factoring in Nords whole controversy from 2-3 years back.
Gotcha. I’ve been on Fedora awhile so I’ve gotten used to using the native NetworkManager gui… So pretty much as long as a VPN publishes their configs, I can set it up. And if they don’t, I won’t be a customer.
I’m not sure about this new ownership and reading this I really prefer their owners over PIAs
Fair enough; obv it’s a personal decision and if you can’t personally trust them and Mullvad seems better to you, go for it.
FWIW it’s not new … they acquired PIA several years ago. I’ve been using them since before Kape acquisition and was originally worried about it but haven’t had any issues and as I mentioned in my other post, I think the folks at PIA are passionate enough about privacy that they’d get the word out if something was up. As the saying goes, you have to trust somebody but ultimately you should be the one to decide who that is.
Mullvad looked good and I may try them at some point as long as they have a 1-3 year option (I dislike monthlies) but IIRC they don’t give you any break on the price when you buy yearly+ so that is a factor for me. If they’re working for you, then more power to you. But PIA works fine for me, and at least for the present I see nothing wrong with them privacy-wise aside from some vague misgivings about things their parent company did in the past (from what I can tell, they’ve been very hands-off since they acquired PIA 2-3 years ago since PIA still open sources their client etc).
The connections thing I can completely understand. I’ve had disconnects here and there. They are annoying to be sure. But they aren’t frequent at least not for me. And anyone serious about privacy should have already tested and have things in place for this scenario (Killswitch if using official client, firewall restricting traffic to tun0 / tap interface if not, etc)
Nord also doesn’t disclose ownership of its holdings… unlike kape which is a publicly traded company, so they have to disclose their holdings (the only reason this guy knows about kape’s affiliate websites). We don’t actually know how many vpns nord owns… it would stand to reason that all major VPN companies do this, if the publicly traded ones that have to be open about it hold any (and we know many do this), then probably the sketchy ones like nord hold others too, but you just don’t know about it. also see my comment earlier, crossrider wasn’t really “malware” (and definitely wasn’t “the opposite of protecting privacy”) and it hasn’t been kape’s business for years. So I don’t think that’s hardcore fanboying, it’s just cutting through the bs.
You really have to do some hardcore fanboying to see Nord as worse of the two evils here at this point
You must not be very knowledge about Nord then. For starters, they do NOT have an open source client (PIA does), they do provide ovpn files but using the older and weaker CBC algorithm vs PIA (GCM) and weaker 2k keys (vs 4k keys @ PIA), despite explicitly advertising GCM and larger 4k keys on their site. And that’s just the obvious stuff… Plenty more out there on the web about them including similar pieces to this that also indicate Nord spies on you and sells data (note: I’m not saying they do for certain but if you’re going to assume PIA is bad, then it’s only fair to assume Nord is bad too).
I like PIA and haven’t had any issues with them. And I wasn’t pleased that Kape bought them (which actually happened 2-3 years ago… Only new thing AFAICT is the addition of the review sites). But what I am saying is that articles like this are FUD that basically amount to “Kape bad, therefore PIA bad” while I have not seen any actual evidence that PIA itself has gone downhill. To the contrary, they continue to offer open source projects and AFAICT have still been every bit as good about user privacy as before their acquisition by Kape. If I see actual changes and not just FUD, I’m more than happy to revise my opinion. If you don’t like them or this scares you, you can always go somewhere else; there’s plenty of options. If PIA didn’t exist, I’d probably check out Mullvad but IIRC you will end up paying slightly more bc Mullvad doesn’t give you a discount for buying 1-3 years at a go like PIA does.
You can have a monopoly and still have large competition
Technically, the term you’re looking for is oligopoly (bc mono literally means one). But my point is that there are 100s of paid VPN providers out there that claim to offer no-log VPN service. And plenty more if you include services that don’t make that claim (such as all the “free” ones). You may generally hear 20-30 of them as the most popular ones on review sites but there’s plenty more besides that. I counted 27 in torrentfreak’s article. Yeah, it sucks in a way because it’s not really true competition between CyberGhost, ExpessVPN, PIA anymore but there is still competition from Nord, Mullvad, ProtonVPN, many others.