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Comment by xrstf | Hacker News Reader

The VPN is operated by "SurfEasy Inc., an Opera company based in Canada".

Just tested it and it worked flawlessly to watch a YouTube video that has been blocked in my country. [Edit: Netflix seems to block SurfEasy already. Sad.]

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They didn’t exactly get a standing ovation the last time¹ they were mentioned on here though (for good reason… if they’re offering a service to help protect people’s privacy, it seems a bit odd that they’d opt to compromise said people’s privacy by having multiple trackers on their website).

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¹ — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10700792

I'd mainly be worried how said VPN is using the subscriber data and what is their policy on storing access logs. But even they promise to not track you how would one even hold them to account considering that they must have an interest in the data due to their adtech part of how the parent/sister Opera company makes its money.

BTW, apparently in order to purchase anything (e.g. to try out YouTube Red -- which checks your Google Payments data) you may still need a credit card matching the country.

This bit me when I tried purchasing foreign versions of games on Steam before (which pre-digital distribution was possible via imports but now tends to suffer from region locking).

As far as Steam is concerned I used Entropay for virtual pre-paid debit cards. I live in the middle east and it happily validated any US address. Entropay does take a 5% commission if you top-up with a credit/debit card however.

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