A new report uncovers the troubling ties between top VPN services like ExpressVPN and the Israeli security state, raising alarms about how much control Israel’s Unit 8200 has over your online privacy.
"Kape Technologies is a major player in the online privacy world, one of the three giants that collectively control the market. It owns many of the world’s top VPNs, including ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, Intego Antivirus, and a host of tech websites that promote its products. Kape brands can be seen sponsoring a wide array of public figures, such as Tucker Carlson, Angry Video Game Nerd, Drew Gooden, Lex Fridman, Cody Ko, Uncle Roger, and Ben Shapiro."
"(Kape Technologies) It also bought a host of VPN review sites, such as vpnMentor and Wizcase – platforms that purport to supply readers with expert information about which VPN would be best for them. vpnMentor insists that this considerable conflict of interest does not affect their ratings."
You don't control any VPN services hosted on someone else's (e.g. a cloud provider's) infrastructure. They have full access and can technically do anything. And they see your incoming and outgoing connections. This is stupid, and doesn't give you any privacy benefit. There are good and trustworthy VPN providers like Mullvad, IVPN and Proton. Just acknowledge that.
MintPress News is pro-Iran, Syria and Russia (Wikipedia). But that doesn't mean what they say here is false, just that we should approach it with our critical faculties working.
Good to know, thanks for sharing. I didn't know about this,. It shows that is really hard to be correctly informed without dedicating an extra effort on many steps of the privacy way.
There is a lot of shady intelligence coming from Israel, there’s enough evidence. But this news outlet isn’t very credible to me. So to avoid ending up in a misinformation rabbit hole, I’m going to agree with @floofloof@lemmy.ca here. Proceed with caution.
I expected this from ExpressVPN and PIA, and I think Kappe was already known doing very shady things, but it's a good reminder, and also there are most probably people who didn't know yet