185
Outcry over ExpressVPN ownership: What the Israeli connection means for user privacy
(www.middleeasteye.net)
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
185 points (99.5% liked)
Privacy
41882 readers
835 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There's a handful of great VPN proiders, and this isn't one of them. Just do like 10 minutes of research before you buy.
The average person might not know what's reputable and what's not. A lot of the VPN review sites are also secretly run by the VPN companies, or get paid off by them. Someone might even mix up the bad
PrivacyToolsfor the legitimatePrivacyGuidesThe thing is that 10 min search results in - trust all of them, trust none of them. A lot of folks also have affordability issues. So that makes this issue even more complex. When they turn a bit more "respected" forums they are told to "self host" or are given recommendations that they already knew of but couldn't afford. So the problem lives on. All this lead to shady and heavy marketing VPNs come to the front.
Mullvad is cheaper than all the other options by far.
No, I am afraid it's not. Just because it has a clear one pricing doesn't make it cheaper. One barely buys a VPN for one or just seven months or so.
Wouldn't self hosting a VPN make you even more identifiable though? Now instead of an generic ISP IP address that changes every few months all your traffic is from a single static IP from a single cloud instance. Not to mention you're now trading your ISP seeing everything to your VPS provider seeing everything (and not just the internet traffic, everything in your server including the keys used for the VPN transport). And if at any point the packets exiting your VPS ends up back on your own ISP's network, they now know it's you who generated them because no one else ever connects to that server. I feel like a public VPN service would have slightly more anonymity simply because you're not the only source of traffic.
I would assume that they mean 'VPN not for anonymity' when they say that. I agree with you though.
the problem w this is that google or chatgpt is going to point you to the most popular ones; which might include this vpn.