No Stupid Questions

Of course, besides the people who fall for the basic "VPN are some magic security device" most people (in particular those that know what they're getting) always looks for the same thing "which one can I actually trust".

Even if it's not government owned you have no idea whose keeping logs, sharing data etc.

So you can really only base your trust on whether the company has come up to any issues with the government and have refused, or has run for a number of years and provide a positive track record. With the changing of laws and how companies work, you also need to regularly check that your they stay respecting privacy and security.

For what it's worth, a VPN company worth is if it private, security and stands up to scrutiny. The moment trust is lost, the company is meaningless. So that's something for those that are long lasting.

No, bc gvts are themselves owned by companies.

All? No. But some? I'd be more surprised if I found out none were.

No, but VPNs are a false illusion of privacy. When you use a VPN, you're really just shifting your trust from your ISP to the VPN company. And governments can just force both to give them the data they have about you

Who is gonna listen to the RIAA and MIAA?

Comcast or the CIA?

I'll take my chances. 🏴‍☠️

Either you give your browsing details to the VPN provider or someone else. It’s never really private. I just have a VPN back to my home network. My ISP sees all my porn surfing and I don’t really give a fuck.

I feel that if your government really wanted your secrets, they'd just send goons to your house to beat the fuck out of you.

I have a VPN to protect me from nosey bastard piracy lawyers.

Only one I'd trust is mullvad

Yeah but would they show their hand by coming down heavy on the average pirate or petty law breaker? If they did have ways to track all VPN traffic they wouldn't want us to know about it.

This is the prime schizo theory about TOR, but realistically they would need to own every exit node to get you.

Generally speaking, governments aren't that good at keeping secrets at scale. Government-run VPNs would require a lot of people doing coordinated work; data center employees, ISPs, people passing themselves off as independent auditors, legal teams, marketing teams, and more. The more people you add, the less likely it is to be kept a secret. And all of this across multiple VPN companies (because there's no guarantee that the person you want to surveil is using the one you own) and internationally (many VPNs are based in or have major operations in multiple countries).

Now, is it possible that the NSA has an undisclosed financial stake in one or more VPNs and has secretly inserted a backdoor? Sure, anything is possible. But is that more likely than them just buying up Ring doorbell footage or doing large data analysis on social media activity? Or installing rootkits on your smartphone firmware? Or just good old fashioned LoJack?

If they have reason to investigate you, they're going to probably get everything anyway. No reason to make it easy for them by not using a VPN.

No, not really. Governments generally aren't that competent that it would be viable as a solution. Especially since there are legitimate uses for VPNs that aren't related to VPN providers, such as the ones that businesses use for people travelling, or working from home.

Although I could see the ones that do tracking putting a slightly higher priority on VPN traffic, just because it stands out more, where non-VPN traffic might be more likely to blend into the noise, since it matches more with how regular users use it.