ExpressVPN employees complain about ex-spy's top role at company

It&#x27;s been clear for a long time that every single commercial VPN service is a waste of money. At best, you replace trusting your ISP with trusting a different group of unknown people with similar motivations. At worst, it&#x27;s a government agency honeypot or someone like Facebook.<p>If you think you want a VPN for &quot;privacy&quot;, use Tor Browser. If you want a VPN for any other reason that &quot;normal people&quot; think they want a VPN, you&#x27;re probably wrong.<p>Why do we even give these companies the time of day?<p>(Small clarification - Most people who want VPNs should use a proxy instead. It fits the use case better. Those still exist and don&#x27;t route ALL of your device&#x27;s traffic over the tunnel.)

Making someone with a history of doing exactly the thing that a company purportedly stands against the CTO seems like an absolutely baffling choice... unless the company is doing that thing (enabling surveillance).<p>If I were to use a VPN service, this news would certainly disqualify ExpressVPN from my list of possible options.<p>I imagine that if I were working for a company like that out of belief in the mission that this news would be difficult.

Get a VPS, they are actually cheaper than VPNs (if you only need one country location).<p>You will have one single IP and you won&#x27;t share IP with hundreds of other people thus being flagged.<p>I have never been blocked from a site when using my VPS, including sites that otherwise block VPNs, I think they don&#x27;t care for whatever reason.<p>Doesn&#x27;t mean they can&#x27;t know, they will, but they seem to not care?<p>Some websites might do.<p>Only way you can get a completely &quot;native&quot; experience is for someone to set up a VPN in a computer connected to a residential connection in the country you want appear in.

A lot of people in the Cybersecurity industry are solely motivated by money. This is an egregious case. In milder cases, I&#x27;ve seen US SAS Cybersecurity providers being casual about customer protection, only caring if it starts hitting their reputation. Protecting people&#x27;s privacy is much lower on their list of priorities. Human rights activists , and other vulnerable people of human-rights-abusing - they&#x27;re not even on the horizon.<p>He must&#x27;ve made a nice packet of money. Must have taken care of his retirement - the company&#x27;s even promoting him. Some citizen&#x27;s family is now at risk, or already imprisoned without a legal process. This must&#x27;ve come as a shock to the Human Rights community. VPN usage is universal there. And this <i>is</i> the tip of the iceberg - surely we know how fine of a dragnet the FBI has. Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, UAE, there&#x27;s a long list of nations that&#x27;d like to snoop on their own people wherever they may be living. Like someone said, Tor is the way to go (tails).

I can&#x27;t believe that employees and customers are falling for the Big Lie technique. &quot;Yes, our CTO is an ex-spy that we never revealed, but he&#x27;s totally not doing it anymore! We promise!&quot;<p>Honestly, how stupid do you have to be to believe this?

<i>It [ExpressVPN] said it had not known of the federal investigation or the details of Gericke&#x27;s work in UAE</i><p>Seriously?<p>So either he lied or they are lying. I&#x27;m not an expert in American employment laws but would have assumed that one of the conditions of employment would be disclosing&#x2F;reporting being under a federal investigation.

I think there&#x27;s a potentially valid argument in saying &quot;who better knows how to protect us from these people than one of their own?&quot;. It&#x27;s perfectly valid to doubt their motivation (and I do), but there&#x27;s a reason defectors are valuable.

For any company, ask why they&#x27;d actually care about doing the right thing.<p>Is it reputation? Integrity? Is the reasoning purely financial?<p>Then ask whether the company operates in a way that suggests they&#x27;d do the profitable thing over the right thing if they think they might get away with it. Does that picture look realistic?<p>As an example, look at Apple. Leaving the tangential discussion about scanning iCloud photos for CSAM aside, they are a company that claims to care about users and about privacy. Whereas every other company is literally trying to send <i>all</i> data to the cloud, Apple is telling us they&#x27;re working to process everything they can on the device itself.<p>What would happen if they were caught selling location data? Caught allowing companies direct access to data aggregated from users that they explicitly say they&#x27;re not collecting? They&#x27;d stand to lose literally many billions of dollars of sales because the thing differentiating them from everyone else would be erased.<p>Which is greater - those billions of dollars of sales as a premium device maker, or those scraps of money they&#x27;d make from underhandedly selling data?<p>Now look at the same scenario but with Facebook, or Google - is it the same? No, because we have no realistic expectation of privacy with either company. They&#x27;re in the news quite often because they&#x27;re doing nefarious things, allowing access to data most people didn&#x27;t even know they&#x27;re collecting, yet people aren&#x27;t really doing things differently because of the news.<p>Imagine the same with companies like ExpressVPN. How much would a disclosure hurt them? How much money could they possibly make by selling private data? Do they employ the kind of people who&#x27;d take the gamble between the two?

Decentralised VPNs are the future.<p>Edit: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvpnalliance.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dvpnalliance.org&#x2F;</a>

Does cloudflare WARP not work?<p>Or AWS self hosted VPN?

All these companies seem to have a different understanding of what business ethics are.

If you don&#x27;t like your job you can always quit. Something I don&#x27;t get is present employees denouncing their employer while expecting to keep their job.

You can use <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satoshivpn.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;satoshivpn.com</a> if you want to be anonymous. You get access to your own private server, and user registration is not even possible.