2023 Paid VPN Relationship and Corporate VPN Ownership Map

Link to the map https://kumu.io/sobeyharker/vpn-relationships#vpn-company-relationships

Relevant:

    
Map Legend

Red - Corporate Relationship &amp; Ownership
Orange - Paid Relationship or Paid Affiliates (Dashes)
Blue - Cooperation or Partnership (These companies may share staff, resources, networks, or facilities with one another).
Purple - Corporate Media Relationship &amp; Ownership
Brown - Legal Dispute
Hover over nodes to highlight relationships
Use right-click to focus on select areas

This is an awesome visualisation, but the subtitle is the best part
aka "THE WHO'S FUCKING WHO"
- This cracked me up also aha

Why do you keep linking to ycombinator and not the actual article?
- Primary sauce and discussion too for context. I added the link in comment to the direct map
- hackernews has some good discussions and the source is right there. I see it as a bonus, if it was reddit I would feel differently.

edit: format
edit2: Proton 2019
edit3: more proton info 2019
edit4: Private Internet Access 2019
Anyone know more?
A lot of people use EVPN, they should know:
Fuck... Proton is out also.
Tesonet Data Mining Company Linked to NordVPN, Protonmail, ProtonVPN
https://web.archive.org/web/20200201174816/https://vpnscam.com/tesonet-data-mining-company-owns-nordvpn-protonmail-protonvpn/
https://web.archive.org/web/20190318213020/https://cryptome.org/2015/11/protonmail-ddos.htm
Private Internet Access also out
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21584958
- Proton responded to the Tesonet thing when that was a big issue, can't remember what was said but I was satisfied enough with their response to continue using them
  
  https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn_and_tesonet/
- Update: Thanks to @JoyfulCodingGuy@lemmy.ml below for clearing up the Proton confusion. I'm glad they can still be trusted.
  Original message: Proton being out is devastating. Why does everything go to shit?
  
  Greed.
  Follow me for more obvious answers.
  
  Like another person said they resolved to that here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn_and_tesonet/
  I guess you decide if you like the response or not but that was a long time ago as well. 🙂

A lot of the top VPNs on here as well as less known VPNs seem to have much less connections.
(protonVPN, Mullvad, and PrivateVPN for example).
Cool site! Though it isn't too good on mobile because it forces the map into a window 1/4 od the screen size 😅

So what's a good VPN these days? Torrent support not needed, just want a little privacy.
- Mullvad is looking pretty good. You can even sign up for them through FirefoxVPN and then you're also supporting Mozilla.
  
  I personally use Mullvad and love it but it is not conducive to helping seed due to port forwarding being blocked.
- I use Mullvad. The map says its only relationship is a sisterhood with Firefox VPN (they use the same servers, but different software).
- Surfshark worked well for me for a long time. Lots of servers, works well for unlocking region blocked content and it's pretty cheap. If you're into full privacy, I recently moved to AirVPN who accept payment through crypto, so you don't have to hand over user data except for an email (which doesn't have to be a real one, you can delete it later).

Torrenting is one thing but I wouldn't be trusting a VPN to protect from anything to attract the heat of the law or government.

I assume the more money they spend on advertising the more dubious and low quality they are, this seems to be the case most of the time I see ads for almost any product. Might as well be a red flag at this point.

double commented
edit on og comment