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Comment by ucha | Hacker News Reader

I understand why no one would want to trust Google and after Snowden's revelations, I don't see why anyone should.

But when it comes to the largest VPNs such as ExpressVPN or Nord VPN, it is impossible to tell who is truly behind them. You cannot put a name on physical person in charge which is very worrying. And since the NSA is known to use front companies to spy on people [1], why couldn't they be behind all these other VPNs? At least, we know who runs Google.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131016033046/http://www.foreig...

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Privacy enthusiasts often seem blind to this risk. I think it's quite likely that virtually all of these VPN providers are run by either state agencies or organized criminals. As the person who personally ran almost all Tor exits for a brief period in the early 2000's, I am here to tell you that if you cannot definitely identify the operator of your VPN or proxy service, then you probably should not use it.

THIS.

I can not believe how many people just blindly recommend VPN like some silver bullet.

Using untrustworthy VPN as a privacy solution is like jumping from the fire into the pavement 20 stories below.

That differs between people, I personally would not mind the NSA running ExpressVPN as a covert outlet because than I at least know for certain my is kept secret by a secure state operator that has incentives aligned with my personal interests.

Any other operator runs the risk of becoming high jacked by other state operators. If you can hack Sony, break DNC email servers, hospitals for records, manipulate windows server functionality or create Stuxnet than a VPN is a cake walk.

A VPN was until this offering from Google a trolley problem. I gladly pay for Google products because they work for me. I even upload my porn to Google Photos because of the superiority of their streaming capabilities coming from the youtube backend.

Wonder if YouTube gonna allow advertising VPN's that seems most youtubers are pushing.

NordVPN is incorporated in Caymans or smth like that. Partly to protect itself from all the legal stuff. In reality it's not huge secret it's real name is Tesonet from Vilnius, Lithuania (which has solid legal system and collaborates with FBI, CIA, etc).

I'm pretty sure it's based in Panama and being a global brand, NordVPN must have offices in a lot of locations, but it's main one is in Panama, which is a pro data privacy country. Moreover, even if some security agency would ask for user data, Nord does not keep logs and has most of its servers operate in RAM only.

Snowden's revelation that the NSA was in Google's network had their engineers pissed, and they immediately changed their architecture to make it more secure, encrypting internal connections. That doesn't make me want to use them less. And Snowden was compromised by Russia even before he went there.

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