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Comment by krn | Hacker News Reader

> Serious question: What's the context of the provided diagram?

There are multiple partnerships and ownerships in VPN and data mining industries that are not publicly admitted, unless something goes wrong[1][2].

Although the presence of these relationships alone is not always enough to claim that customers' privacy has been violated, it makes these companies look much less trustworthy in the long run.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/29/8685251/hola-vpn-botnet-s...

[2] https://torrentfreak.com/images/Luminati-Networks-LTD-vs-UAB... [pdf]

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Thanks for your reply.

Just checked out vpnscam.com for the first time, and its content scream in tinfoil hats giving me negative first impression.

It's really a dilemma to me: small providers haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy, while well established ones are connected to another business somewhat. How does one choose a reliable VPN provider?

And same goes with self hosted OpenVPN server, what's to say that the VPS provider will always put customers' interest first?

> How does one choose a reliable VPN provider?

Learn to do it yourself. If privacy is your top priority, you can't trust any available VPN providers out there.

> Just checked out vpnscam.com for the first time, and its content scream in tinfoil hats giving me negative first impression.

I think that's because this site is most likely run by some other competing VPN company. They are all trying to win by collecting and publishing everything about each other.

> It's really a dilemma to me: small providers haven't proven themselves to be trustworthy, while well established ones are connected to another business somewhat. How does one choose a reliable VPN provider?

I am personally more inclined to trust VPN providers that don't pay affiliate commissions, don't hide behind offshore companies, don't ask for their costumers' email addresses, state the full names of the people behind the company publicly, and adopt the most advanced open-source solutions early[1].

The other option is self-hosting Algo[2] on OVH or Hetzner.

[1] https://mullvad.net/en/guides/category/wireguard/

[2] https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

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