Many VPN companies are launching new "security" products in the following areas: Unfortunately, in the VPN world, it usually just means more money for marketing.īut wait, there's more! The latest troubling trend making headway in the VPN space is companies offering unrelated products entirely outside of the scope of privacy. Is that all you've got?Ĭompanies merging is not always bad (but usually is), as it allows them to eliminate redundancies, consolidate expenses, and have a bigger war chest when it comes to R&D, hiring and marketing. Canceled NordVPN? Get ready to have dreams about surfing sharks when you sleep. They use a marketing technique known as 're-targeting', which requires companies to upload personal user data (emails) to the likes of Google and Facebook (you know, the companies they claim to protect you from), so that their VPN ads can follow you around the internet. This ensures that their ad spend goes farther in the attempt to recapture churning users. Since the aforementioned companies likely spend more on marketing than they do operations (which is why you see them being advertised everywhere), you can be sure that they fully intend to make use of all the trackers they have on their websites. And so you're back where you started without even knowing it. An alternative that happens to be owned by the same company. Then you might hit up your favorite VPN "review" site for advice, or you'll see a VPN ad on your favorite YouTube channel that ranks gerbils based on cuteness, both of which will point you to an amazing alternative. When you decide you don't want to waste your hard-earned money on their service, you will attempt to cancel it (assuming you can successfully navigate the maze that is the cancellation process) and find a replacement. The second is to make it difficult for the average consumer to know which VPN companies are owned by the same parent company. In truth, they are doing this for two entirely different reasons: the first is to avoid taxes. Many VPN companies hide behind complex corporate structures that span continents, falsely claiming that this is to protect end-user privacy. Most people who use VPNs are oblivious to who owns and operates them, and this is by design. So why is this bad? Choice (or lack of it) A list that will, most likely, continue shrinking in size in the future. This leaves a very slim list of independently owned and transparently operated companies. j2Global - Owns IPVanish, StrongVPN, ibVPN, SaferVPN,, BufferedVPN along with a large amount of tech publications.Kape Technologies - Owns ExpressVPN, Cyberghost, PrivateInternetAccess, Zenmate as well as VPNMentor (a top VPN "review" site). It's effectively identical to the ISP analogy above: The only thing worse than our telecom industry is our banking system, but you probably don't have all day to hear me rant about that. The same is true in Canada, where we have the Rogers and Bell oligopoly. Name one person who is happy with the service they receive from either of those companies. Slowly but surely, these companies start buying each other up and consolidating, leading up to the present day where we are left with Comcast, Charter and Verizon. Dozens of ISPs are popping up and competing against each other on service and quality. So what does the consumer VPN market look like right now? Let's pretend that it's the 90's in the US Internet Service Provider space. These two companies, alongside ExpressVPN, are single-handedly responsible for supplying all of your favourite YouTubers with 6+ figure incomes to sell you snake oil. They sponsor every popular YouTuber out there to hawk VPN services while making unfounded and outright false claims about the capabilities of their product (or any VPN, for that matter). You're probably no stranger to Nord and Sufshark's marketing tactics either. If you look at the OpenVPN configs for both Nord and Surfshark, you will find them freakishly similar, almost as if they have been copying each other/collaborating for years. The similarities don't stop here, however. Wait a second, isn't the Netherlands technically part of the " Eyes Alliance" that every VPN review site claims to be worse than cancer? I guess it doesn't make as much of a difference as SEO marketers will lead you to believe.Īnyone following these two companies closely probably noticed similarities between Nord and Surfshark years ago. It looks like folks at NordVPN/NordSecurity/Cyberspace are taking the whole "proxy" idea a little too seriously, albeit in a completely wrong context: now you've got a Lithuanian company, registered in Panama, owned by a Dutch corporation. NordVPN just announced that it's merging with Surfshark to create a new company called "Cyberspace" (geez, did my Grandma name this?) to be based out of the Netherlands.
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