Anyone who knows anything about VPN services knows that they don't stop people from looking in on what you're doing; they only stop people other than the provider from doing so.<p>Most if not all of the big VPN providers collect data and give it to law enforcement, which isn't exactly news to us.<p>Tom Scott had a pretty good video on what VPNs can actually deliver on, despite the claims of many sponsored content creators. He lost his VPN sponsorship because he pointed out, among other things, that you don't actually have guaranteed privacy with these services.
>"From day one of our operations, we have never provided any customer data to law enforcement.. We never, for a second, logged user VPN traffic,"<p>Dutch ISP KPN was the target of a blackmail attempt in October 2017 by an ex-employee who was using NordVPN. According to a lecture given by KPN's cert team members at BalCCon 2019, NordVPN gave out everything they had including logs to law enforcement. Pretty sure someone can find the court documents about it.
It's mind boggling that selling VPN services became a thing. Was I the NSA or any state level actor, selling a VPN service as a front seems the best thing to do to cast a pretty wide net.
It is surprising for me how people can't imagine a scenario where:<p>Some government agency (KGB, FBI, CSI, whatever) comes to VPN, secure mail, etc provider;
Informs that some "enemy of the state" is using the service;
Demands to overtake the service, install some software etc;
Or else CEO of the service is also an "enemy of the state".<p>From this moment this service is not only "not secure" but directly allows access to your email data, leaks all the keys, passwords, browsing history, logs whatever they want etc.<p>Yeah VPN will allow you cheat Netflix. Never trust any service to not comply to some government agency.
NordVPN is incorporated in Caymans, while actual dev team is in Lithuania (Tesonet). They also sell “ethically” sourced residential proxies via Oxylabs :)