The advice is everywhere, from Consumer Reports to the New York Times to the Federal Trade Commission: If you care to keep your web browsing private and secure, you should consider a virtual private network, or VPN.
A VPN encrypts your internet traffic and routes it through remote servers, protecting your data (like your browsing history, downloads, and chat messages) and masking your location. Long popular with hackers and software pirates, VPNs are poised to go mainstream—like ad blockers before them—as the average internet user becomes more sophisticated about online privacy. Reliable data on their use is hard to come by, but two VPNs recently cracked the top 30 of Apple’s App Store, surging ahead of mainstays such as Lyft, PayPal, and Yelp. One industry analysis estimates that VPN usage worldwide quadrupled between 2016 and 2018, while a forecast by Global Market Insights predicts the U.S. VPN market will be worth more than $54 billion by 2024.
So shouldn’t I, like, have one? After all, I’m a tech columnist who is well aware of how chimerical our assumptions of online privacy can be, and who occasionally does reporting that involves secrets and anonymity. I sometimes connect to insecure Wi-Fi networks at airports or coffee shops, and while I’ve never pirated a movie, there are times when I wouldn’t mind skirting geographic restrictions on web content. I certainly don’t like having to trust my internet service provider, Verizon, with all of my browsing data. And yet, for years, I’ve resisted signing up for—or even fully understanding—a technology that many privacy and security mavens consider essential to safe browsing.
The search for a VPN I could rely on 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. An executive for that rival, ExpressVPN, insisted that isn’t true, though he wouldn’t disclose where the owners are actually based or even who they are. (The company is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands.) He argued the secrecy is actually a virtue because governments can’t apply pressure to ExpressVPN’s principals to give up user data if they don’t know who, or even where, those principals are. Indeed, 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.”
While it’s possible AnchorFree is just trolling ExpressVPN by suggesting that it’s based in China, the risk is not imaginary. On Feb. 7, while I was working on this story, U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Marco Rubio called for the Department of Homeland Security to launch an investigation into the risk of foreign governments spying on Americans via VPN apps.
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