A new report uncovers the troubling ties between top VPN services like ExpressVPN and the Israeli security state, raising alarms about how much control Israel’s Unit 8200 has over your online privacy.

“Kape Technologies is a major player in the online privacy world, one of the three giants that collectively control the market. It owns many of the world’s top VPNs, including ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate, Intego Antivirus, and a host of tech websites that promote its products. Kape brands can be seen sponsoring a wide array of public figures, such as Tucker Carlson, Angry Video Game Nerd, Drew Gooden, Lex Fridman, Cody Ko, Uncle Roger, and Ben Shapiro.”

“(Kape Technologies) It also bought a host of VPN review sites, such as vpnMentor and Wizcase – platforms that purport to supply readers with expert information about which VPN would be best for them. vpnMentor insists that this considerable conflict of interest does not affect their ratings.”

What do you think of all this?

  • @floofloof@lemmy.caEnglish
    17•8 days ago

    MintPress News is pro-Iran, Syria and Russia (Wikipedia). But that doesn’t mean what they say here is false, just that we should approach it with our critical faculties working.

    • @d4rko@beehaw.orgOP
      4•7 days ago

      Good to know, thanks for sharing. I didn’t know about this,. It shows that is really hard to be correctly informed without dedicating an extra effort on many steps of the privacy way.

      • @Caliper@beehaw.org
        1•7 days ago

        I looked at the other articles on the site and that already caused some red flags. Then looked at the wiki and saw the same thing.

  • @ReversalHatchery@beehaw.orgEnglish
    8•8 days ago

    What do you think of all this?

    I expected this from ExpressVPN and PIA, and I think Kappe was already known doing very shady things, but it’s a good reminder, and also there are most probably people who didn’t know yet

  • @tkw8@lemm.eeEnglish
    8•7 days ago

    If you aren’t using either proton vpn, Mullvad or ivpn, you’re asking for trouble imo.

      • @unrushed233@lemmings.world
        2•7 days ago

        You don’t control any VPN services hosted on someone else’s (e.g. a cloud provider’s) infrastructure. They have full access and can technically do anything. And they see your incoming and outgoing connections. This is stupid, and doesn’t give you any privacy benefit. There are good and trustworthy VPN providers like Mullvad, IVPN and Proton. Just acknowledge that.

        • @refalo@programming.dev
          1•7 days ago

          You don’t control any VPN services hosted on someone else’s (e.g. a cloud provider’s) infrastructure

          We must have very different definitions of “control”.

          They have full access and can technically do anything.

          You could say the same for anyone with physical access to a machine. But the people who have to worry about that likely aren’t reading this.

          And they see your incoming and outgoing connections.

          So does any bandwidth provider you pay money to.

          This is stupid, and doesn’t give you any privacy benefit.

          Highly debatable and subjective IMO

          There are good and trustworthy VPN providers

          Depends on your definition of trustworthy… some say it’s impossible to trust any company.

  • Wait A MinuteEnglish
    8•7 days ago

    The fact that all of these softwares are owned by one company is creepy , regardless of Israel

  • @S13Ni
    1•8 days ago

    I’m not particularly surprised. My tinfoil hat headcanon is that most VPNs, messengers and whatever security measures, especially the most popular ones, are some kind of surveillance fronts.

        • @refalo@programming.dev
          3•7 days ago

          Not using javascript is like a huge beacon of light screaming just how unique you really are. There are several methods for fingerprinting you without JS, or even without CSS/HTML.

          And the number of people not using JS being very small, it doesn’t take as many bits of information to uniquely identify you.

          • @unrushed233@lemmings.world
            1•7 days ago

            And basically 99% of the modern web doesn’t work without JS. I don’t know why there are still so many people running around and saying “disAblE jAvAscrIpT!!!”, yeah like how the fuck am I supposed to use the web??? At that point, I could also just delete my web browser, it would literally have the exact same effect.

            • @refalo@programming.dev
              3•7 days ago

              I think there’s mainly two usecases:

              • the “weird” people who don’t visit any mainstream sites and live under a rock

              • people who disable JS by default but are always adding exceptions for sites that need it

              • @unrushed233@lemmings.world
                1•7 days ago

                I tried the second approach for some time, but using NoScript became really annoying, since I never knew which scripts are necessary, and which are used for tracking or some other bullshit. It was always trial and error, and just felt tedious and unnecessary. I wish NoScript would have a built in whitelist of scripts that are known to be necessary for websites to function, this would avoid breakages and make it much more comfortable to use.