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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

What's the best VPN provider now that PIA got acquired by an Israeli spyware company?

Source [1]. Truly insane. I'd never have expected this from a company that cares so much about privacy. Just cancelled my ProtonVPN subscription.

I was going to recommend ProtonVPN but they have a pretty sketch background/history too. [2]

Cloudflare's WireGuard-based Warp VPN [3] might be worth keeping an eye on, but Cloudflare makes it clear that users should not be expecting the privacy guarantees of a "traditional VPN" [4]:

> WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you’re traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit. If you’re looking for that kind of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are likely better choices for you.

Perhaps we simply shouldn't use VPN services. [5]

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19266078

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19542835

[4]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-warp-plus/

[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16371030

Not to put too fine a point on it, they lost money for too long, and ended up needing a buyer.

I always did wonder how they could offer so much for so little money.

How can VPN providers lose money, when a DO Droplet for $5 a month can probably host 5 casual subscribers using things on and off?

Meant to say “just cancelled my PIA subscription” :)

For many years, my stock answer was AirVPN, Insorg, IVPN, Mullvad and PIA. And Cryptohippie, except that it cost too much. But its prices are more competitive now. Those are some of the oldest around, and being in business longer with no bad news increases trust.

But now there's this with PIA. Which decreases trust. But yet they were one of the few that had actually "proved" in court that they didn't retain logs. So I guess that I still trust them some.

There's no "best", all of them have tradeoffs. I recommend looking at https://thatoneprivacysite.net/ which has an extensive list of various providers along with various privacy criteria.

I also think it's important to understand that despite the marketing, using a VPN isn't a hard privacy improvement. All it does is move the trust you'd otherwise place in your ISP elsewhere. Your traffic is still visible to a third party with unverifiable practices.

Back to the subject of providers, personally I use Mullvad, ProtonVPN, IVPN and NordVPN at various times. Mullvad is great for privacy, IVPN has WireGuard and plenty of locations, ProtonVPN is one of the only providers with a server in Russia (I use it for region-unblocking) and NordVPN has an insane number of locations.

Founder of WifiMask VPN here. Maybe you want to try it with a free trial for 7 days :-) : wifimask.com.

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