It's not just PIA. Nord VPN, ProtonVPN, etc all have ties to or owned by shady companies.
It you want real anonymity, use tor. If you want to change your internet access location, lease a VPS, and set up OpenVPN/Wireguard on it.
It you want real anonymity, use tor. If you want to change your internet access location, lease a VPS, and set up OpenVPN/Wireguard on it.
The investors of Proton Technologies AG are also public information, and they include FONGIT (a Swiss non-profit foundation supported by the Swiss government), CRV (private investment firm best known for their investments in Twitter, Zendesk, etc) and the European Union, who collectively have a minority interest. Actually, the European Commission doesn't have a financial stake as their funding is non-dilutive. Whether or not these entities are shady is a matter of opinion of course, but these are all well-known public entities.
ProtonVPN was also extensively checked by Mozilla before they partnered with us last year, and they also checked into this, details here: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/10/22/testing-n...