Hidden VPN Owners Unveiled: 97 VPNs Run by 23 Companies.
Not really surprising. In the U.S. almost all of the media outlets in the country is owned by something like only 6 companies. I did find this bit amusing:
Gaditek, the Karachi-based tech company, officially claims to own just 3 VPN products (PureVPN, Ivacy and the newer Unblock VPN & Proxy). However, we’ve discovered two more VPN products. We also show that this company runs the VPN review sites vpnranks.com, bestvpnservice.com, bestvpn.co, and 2 others
Well, this is a pretty interesting article with some comprehensive research. Parts of this aren’t exactly new or unknown, as there are many VPN brands listed that are considered to be a privacy nightmare. It certainly makes an impression when you take the time to create pretty infographics about it, that’s for sure.
There’s one thing to take note of though: without naming specific companies or VPN brands, the absence of just about all of the more professionally regarded VPN services is absent from this research. Is that because they also apply a more professional attention toward hiding their links and dirty secrets, or is it because VPN companies are like people, some are good and some are bad?
In any case, I also have a little bit of a different perspective on the information presented in the article. Just because a parent entity owns or has acquired multiple sub-companies that each run their own brand of VPN service, doesn’t automatically classify them as untrustworthy. I’m sure the majority that were mentioned in this research are companies I wouldn’t want to interact with at all, but I wouldn’t go as far as to apply this to all of them without knowing more about them.
On the surface, it may seem that the VPN market is teeming with various companies competing for a piece of the growing consumer VPN pie.
However, when we began to look further into the VPNs and the companies that own them, we noticed something interesting: a lot of these products are owned by the same company. With our interests piqued, we decided to dig deeper to see just how many VPN products are owned or operated by which companies.
The number may surprise you:
Our research shows that at least 97 VPN products are owned or operated by only 23 companies.
This includes both cross-platform and mobile-only VPN products. It also includes direct subsidiaries or products/brands, as well as white label services. This represents a much bigger number than was previously reported in other research.
Click thru for more!
A Mod note: we usually don’t cover specific VPNs here, but in this case, it’s a group of deceitful VPNs and describes the industry as a whole. It’s also a very comprehensive study – these authors did really great work here. So, if it brushes close to our No Discussing Individual VPNs rule, it’s the exception that proves the rule.
so blindly trusting an unknown entity so completely that your route all of your activities through their servers even though you have no idea who they are or what they might be doing with your data even after you realize that you just instituted a perfect MITM situation and even paid for the privilege of getting totally owned was not a good idea?
Well butter by cornbread.
my opinion: I personally tried hotspotsh**** premium last time, it was a nightmare, I accidentally downloaded the free version on pc and adware, homepage being changed, and also the http header is also rigged. I completely unintalled it and ask the customer service to help me remove the adware.
Stackpath also owns a ton of vpns IIRC. Its similar to the usenet landscape where they were also involved iirc (omricon).
Great article! My takeaway: Don’t trust any commercial VPN provider for privacy, no matter where they are located or what kind of policies they advertise. That being said, these services do have their use cases. I’m currently using ExpressVPN (NordVPN before that) to watch Netflix Japan from the Shield TV. The App is set to split tunnel mode, so only Netflix traffic goes through it. Even if that was not the case, there’s no sensitive data on the Shield, so the VPN vendor would end up with some more media watching patterns that aren’t exclusively mine anyway at most.
Thanks - I heard about this “report” but nothing actually had the companies listed.
Mullvad is still legit <3
I read somewhere that after the success NSA had with Google. VPNs were the next strategy. I have a hard time trusting any US or Foreign VPN now that the government can just buy the data and make the company keep its mouth shut.
Isn’t the number actually smaller considering the article includes whitelabel VPNs?
(To my knowledge these whitelabel VPNs are owned and operated by the company it’s been sold to, not the creators)*
*Happy to be corrected if I’m wrong 
Yeah the media giants should be old news by now. But having worked in IT since 04 we saw the same buy ups happen within web hosting companies. Before the cloud pushed them all out they were often merging smaller into larger.
And of course the cloud escalated that even further. There was a similar figure recently thrown around about so and so many websites run on Amazon.
Imho it’s just an effect of capitalism (free market), say what you want about that. Not trying to get into a political debate.
This is common practice in the industry, to run a “Review” or “Ranking” site that puts your products up top.
The top two comments here give a pretty good idea why some big brands may be missing. VPN owners: 97 VPN products run by 23 companies | Hacker News
Which would you consider to be the ‘privacy nightmares’?
Seems like an odd rule for a privacy focused community but 
Where can someone find recommendations or information about VPN providers that legitimately prioritize user privacy?
Isn’t it the same of ISPs that they know everything we do and sell our data to whoever they want? Who do you trust more, them or VPNs?
So, there is any VPN thats still safe?
Ad-financed operations like AnchorFree Hotspot Shield are the real privacy nightmares to me. Those are the VPN services you know have already sold your data to advertisers because it’s incredibly obvious, as another comment here in this thread confirms as well. There’s no point in using them, unless masking your real IP address to a specific service is more important than your privacy.
Then of course there is the ownership nationality to keep in mind. While on its own there need not be any obvious signs that would cause one to mistrust the service, jurisdiction by law or influence should be enough of a reason to stay wary. For the same reason I’d not be comfortable using a VPN whose operator is based in the US, UK or China if I were to use it for more serious stuff than hiding from tracking by creepy and invasive companies.
I put the company location in the same category as VPN services that advertise with no-logging claims but keep logs anyway. This one is not in the realm of conspiracy theories because we know it has happened at least once, but I also think this is a fear the regular user is a little bit too paranoid about.
Since my primary goal is to stop companies from tracking me across the web and from associating my online activity with my personal identity, a VPN makes an important part of my toolkit, but on its own it’s certainly not enough. I don’t use a VPN to shield/obscure/hide my illegal online activity though, depending on the activity (and there are a good number of moral activities that are illegal in whatever country I may not live in) a VPN on its own will not be enough.
In my case I don’t really care about any (no) logging claims of the VPN provider. It’s all about trust anyway: how would you know that a VPN provider was telling the truth about there being no logs? Just the same, how would you know that a VPN didn’t secretly collect metadata about your internet activity? Until that blind trust gets broken, you can’t know.