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Comment by danpalmer | Hacker News Reader

I don't know about the process of the sale/takeover of Freenode, but I'm a long time PIA user and have a fair amount of trust and goodwill for London Trust Media (the owner of PIA and now Freenode).

- PIA is much better designed for privacy than many competitors

- They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing

- They have been fairly open with how their tech works and it all sounds reasonable

- London Trust Media have sponsored the Open Rights Group (the UK's equivalent of the EFF) in the past and engaged in ORG events.

It's hard to know how much you can trust an organisation as an outsider, but for me they tick most of the good/reasonable boxes. They may have messed Freenode around, but I'd be surprised if there was a significant danger to user privacy here.

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> - PIA is much better designed for privacy than many competitors

I used Private Internet Access for a long time. When they merged with Kape Technologies (resulting in the ludicrous situation of having Mark Karpelès as their CTO) I lost all faith in them and immediately switched to Mullvad.

Having used both, I can tell you that Mullvad is far better designed. Mullvad has only account numbers, no usernames, emails or passwords. Creating an account is one click. Mullvad has an all-in-one VPN check page. Mullvad provides easy preconfigured OpenVPN configurations for any of their servers (you don't have to add your credentials among other things; as I understand PIA still just offers an "openvpn.zip" with a bunch of files you have to edit, which is error prone.) Mullvad is based in Sweden, not America.

All of these things provide much better privacy than PIA. And on top of that I don't recall any scandals with Mullvad than resemble the merger with Kape or the current situation with Freenode. These events should make you question whether you should continue to trust PIA.

> - When they merged with Kape Technologies (resulting in the ludicrous situation of having Mark Karpelès as their CTO) I lost all faith in them and immediately switched to Mullvad.

This is not true. Mark was hired by London Trust Media and never worked for PIA. Since Kape acquired PIA in December of 2019, there is no connection at all between Mark and PIA.

London Trust Media was sold and most of those things were the doing of the old owners.

> They don't seem to get into the "snake oil privacy" marketing that so many VPN providers seem to be doing

Do you mean the "hide your IP address <from vague/unspecified parties for similarly vague/unspecified reasons" stuff? Because over time I've heard many paid sponsorship shout-outs (and also direct adverts) in podcasts & youtube clips to PIA quoting that and related stuff.

Have you noticed any significant changes in quality or transparency since the Kape acquisition? There was a lot of concern around that time. I was a happy customer until then, but I chose not to renew at my next term. I'm curious to hear your experience since.

Good point, I hadn't considered this. The service quality has probably increased, product seems more active. As for the privacy/trust angle, I haven't seen as much public commenting from them but I haven't been looking for it. Seems fine so far.

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