This year, Kape additionally bought a group of VPN review sites that give top ratings to the VPN services it owns.Ī Kape spokeswoman said that Crossrider, which has long been shut down, was a development platform that was misused by those who distributed malware. In the last five years, Kape has also bought several other popular VPN services, including CyberGhost VPN, Zenmate and, just last month, ExpressVPN in a $936 million deal. Kape was previously called Crossrider, a company that was named in a research paper by the University of California and Google as being part of an ecosystem of businesses using so-called ad injection technology that could behave maliciously. In 2019, I saw the news that the service had been acquired by Kape Technologies, a security firm in London. For several years, I subscribed to a popular VPN service called Private Internet Access. “There’s no good way to know what they’re doing with your data, which they have huge amounts of control over.” “Trusting these people is really critical,” Matthew Green, a computer scientist who studies encryption, said about VPN providers. If you can’t trust a product that claims to protect your privacy, what good is it? That’s a deal-breaker when it comes to using a VPN service, which intercepts our internet traffic. Many of the most popular VPN services are now also less trustworthy than in the past because they have been bought by larger companies with shady track records. The reality is that web security has improved so much in the last few years that VPN services, which charge monthly subscription fees that cost as much as Netflix, offer superfluous protection for most people concerned about privacy, some security researchers said. But just as tech gadgets become outdated over time, so does some tech advice. I’m done with paying for a virtual private network, a service that claims to protect your privacy when you’re connected to a public Wi-Fi network at the local coffee shop, the airport or a hotel.įor more than a decade, security experts have recommended using a VPN to shield your internet traffic from bad actors who are trying to snoop on you.