I use Private Internet Access and haven’t had any issues with it. I get good speeds through the client and have the option to use OpenVPN if I choose to. For $6 a month, it’s a good deal.
Am I the only one who worries that by taking obvious steps to protect one’s privacy, like using an anonymising VPN, you’ll end up drawing more attention to yourself? As in, “They’re trying to protect their privacy, so they must be doing something wrong.”
You have the right to your privacy/security just as much as any business. I’m a firm believer that this overt monitoring is state power first and foremost, ‘they’ would love to hear that the thought of taking steps to secure your information is a concern to you.
Is PIA US based? That would be one to avoid if so…
Seconded, absolutely!. PIA kicks ass! I had VyprVPN for a few months… continuous outages & hangups, and they logged everything. PIA DOES NOT keep logs.
Here’s the best VPN review site that I’ve seen:
www.deepdotweb.com/2014/07/08/is-your-vpn-legit-or-shit/
Check it out!
PS: Cory, Thanx for an excellent article!
Considering that this is exactly the same logic that the U.S. government apparently uses to justify investigating TOR users, yes.
I used Private Internet Access as well. However, I do wonder how effective it is at concealing one’s internet habits from the government. GCHQ’s Tempora project basically records all internet traffic in the UK; if you use one of the UK endpoints, GCHQ will have all the traffic that enters and leaves a the UK servers - I wonder how possible it is given enough datapoints to correlate with reasonable precision any websites that are regularly visited by someone using a VPN service.
I would also not be surprised if I found out the security services in other countries were recording the metadata of every packet going in and out of popular VPN services.
Another big thumbs up for PIA. Been using them for over a year and have been extremely pleased - especially with their technical support site and configuration guides. They have instructions for every possible platform and even how to embed the service directly into your DD-WRT compatible router so that any device that connects to your network is automatically protected.
Great link! anyone have any info on MULLVAD? Their privacy seems best, but what about speed/service?
Sounds like a fruitless concern to me. VPNs are what “the players” use, such as governments and corporations, among others.
By analogy, what you were saying reminds me of: “Locking my house only encourages people to break in, thinking I have valuables inside. So I should leave my door open to make it easier for everyone.”
After an exhaustive search a little while back, i decided on Mullvad since they seemed to have the best security and philosophy of the bunch. Overall everything went quite well, only downside was that they were rather slow. I’ve since switched to PIA, and have been pleased with the service; speeds are significantly better. That said, i still have this vague impression that Mullvad is the more secure of the two.
After trying a few others PIA is really the only option. Good speed. Easy to install. Point and click software, connect/disconnect change location in seconds right from the windows toolbar…
All for $6 a month. Really you would be crazy not to use them.
Been using https://ironsocket.com for several months and at the moment, I can say I am fully satisfied by IronSocket. The cool thing I like about them is that their bandwidth is so cool and i did not experience any logs. Imo, they guarantee zero log policy. Been using them to unblock sites such Netflix and I am very lucky to watch my fave shows. (Great movie list this March, you should watch them.) IronSocket provides DNS proxy, VPN services and they are so cool. They are easy to deal with. Especially their Tech Support, they are friendly and funny. Anyway, let me share you an experience with PIA that I did not like at all. I asked for assistance and I was ignored. I felt bad. It broke my Internet connection down, so I had to restart it all over again. That’s my experience. I don’t know if you gonna believe me but yeah I’m just sharing.
I use Mullvad across multiple devices, and it’s the one I recommend for journalist colleagues with above-average security needs. It’s never failed me in a year’s worth of hard use. Recently there seems to be issues with their Mac client, but no hiccups on the standard OpenVPN clients.
Which is why I’ve never had reason to use their support.
Speed is excellent, but YMMV. From South Africa we get better results to European providers, and the bandwidth bottleneck is always local-loop than at the VPN side.
Certainly it’s possible, but as I see it, the more people that encrypt their stuff, the more difficult it becomes for the ‘snoops’. And since they’re ‘sucking-up’ all of our shit illegally anyway, why make it easy for them? The bottom line is, Encrypt it all!
Hopefully, someday they’ll get the message and start using their tech and their time to actually look for the ‘real’ terrorists.
Edited 09:19: From an article in today’s ‘TechDirt’:
It’s time the intelligence agencies accepted that the “collect it all” approach is not just failing, but actually exactly wrong: what we need is not more surveillance, but much less of it and much better targeted.
I use Private Internet Access, like many others, but have a real problem with torrenting. If I try to download (or seed) a torrent, PIA seems to cause my connection to cut off within about ten minutes of downloading. Anyone else noticed this?
There are several threads about this, but I haven’t managed to wade through them yet.
I currently work at ActiVPN company. I can say that we do not give any access or logs to autority and we have NEVER been asked for that.
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