View from the Labs

Read the subreddits or watch the sponsored influencer videos and you can get entirely the wrong idea about VPNs – so treat the gossip for what it is

The consumer VPN industry is young compared to the rest of the online security world, and lacks the relatively staid reputation of many of its counterparts. So we get bombastic advertising claims, wildly irrelevant YouTube influencer and gaming sponsorships, and officially endorsed subreddits where users are allowed to speculate about which of a company’s rivals are secretly fronts for government agencies. This isn’t helped by some genuine controversies, from run-of-the-mill corporate acquisitions that have seen a single company own both multiple VPN firms and several publications that review them (Kape and J2 Global), to companies handing over logs they promised that they didn’t keep in the first place (PureVPN, IPVanish under previous ownership). This has led to a blame culture within the industry, with companies and their surprisingly partisan fans keen to…

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PC Pro (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2024

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