How Can You Decide Which VPN To Trust?

Slate's senior technology writer reports that his hunt for a reliable ISP 'led me on a convoluted journey through accusations and counteraccusations, companies with shadowy leadership and those with conflicts of interest, and VPN ratings sites that might be even shadier than the companies they're reviewing.'

Many VPNs appear to be outright scams. Others make internet browsing sluggish. Free versions bombard you with ads. It's a world so thicketed that the leading firms and experts can't agree on the basic criteria for what counts as 'reputable,' let alone which companies best meet that description. The CEO of one top VPN company, Silicon Valley-based AnchorFree, told me in a phone interview that he suspects one of his top rivals is secretly based in China -- which would raise a red flag for many privacy advocates because of the Chinese government's aggressive surveillance regime... [But] many VPN users consider offshore providers preferable to U.S.-based firms. AnchorFree, for its part, has been dinged by reviewers for running a free, ad-supported VPN, which some privacy experts consider a conflict of interest. (It also offers a paid VPN service.) The two companies point to dueling trust reports by outside groups, each of which appears to reflect well on the firm that's touting it, thanks to different methodologies. 'It is fascinating the amount of sniping that goes on' between VPN companies, said Joseph Jerome, who has closely studied VPNs in his role as policy counsel for the Privacy and Data Project at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology. 'They are very quick to pull out knives and shiv each other....'

If it's so hard to assess the credibility of the industry's top names...you can imagine how difficult it might be to suss out the myriad lesser-known alternatives. A January investigation by the site Top10VPN found that more than half of the top 20 free VPN apps on the iOS and Android app stores either have Chinese ownership or are based in China. That's all the more suspicious given that China officially banned VPNs last year. The concern: If China is allowing them to continue operating, it could be because they're sharing data on their users with the Chinese government. When you use a VPN, you're trusting that VPN with the same deep level of access to your online activity that you'd normally give your ISP. In other words, now they can see what you're up to whenever you're using the internet. VPNs may be more privacy-focused than big, corporate ISPs, but they're also smaller, more opaque, and less publicly accountable.
'I just wanted internet privacy. I hadn't bargained on a knife fight...' the author writes, concluding that 'Several weeks, dozens of calls, and thousands of words later, I can't say I'm much closer to a clear-cut answer... One of the only definitive takeaways, besides 'steer clear of free VPNs,' is that your choice of VPN should depend on what you're using it for.

'If you're just trying to stay safe online, it may make sense to steer toward a larger, U.S.-based company that's clear about both who owns it and how it treats your data.'

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