 This video was not sponsored by private internet access or any other random VPN company. My thoughts are the same on all of them. I just don't necessarily trust them. I don't think you're doing anything more when you use VPN than kicking the privacy can down the road. So you're worried that your internet provider, be it Comcast, AT&T, etc., will monetize your existence and look at the IP addresses and DNS entries that they can sniff along the line and then sell that data for money. I don't doubt that they will do that. I don't have much evidence that companies such as private internet access, I don't have evidence that they do it, I don't have evidence that they don't do it. And the whole point of this video is our merger with Cape Technologies and addressing your concerns, they want to address them for us. And I do have an affiliate, not a sponsorship, but an affiliate link for private internet access. The difference between a sponsor and an affiliate? Affiliate link is I was not paid specifically to endorse their product, but I do have an offer that if you are going to sign up with it anyways, hey, use my link and maybe the channel gets a little bit of help from you signing up. VPN companies are not as altruistic as many people think. My reason for liking private internet access is because they've donated heavily to many open source products and this is why over at our Linux, and I'll leave links to this, there's a big discussion going on about, well, you know, they are a privacy focus. I don't know any VPN company that doesn't say their privacy focus. It's a buzzword, but they did do put their money where their mouth is because they did donate to many open source projects. That's one of the reasons I thought that, hey, I should probably have an affiliate link if I'm going to have one. People are going to sign up anyways. Why not use my affiliate link? Cool. There's no obligation to do so. And they donated some of their money to these projects. That's great. They also helped pay for the public audit of OpenVPN. So that's another bonus, you know, they use OpenVPN on the back end and pay for the audit. But, you know, this is the article everyone's talking about CyberGhost, which is another partner with the folks over at and they've changed name sense. Then Cape Technology used to be CrossRider and CrossRider had this money making scheme of let's install some malware with it. I don't know. I mean, I think this is terrible. He did this. Don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing that part of it. But these companies are in business to make money. And they look for new ways to make money, not new ways to protect your privacy. They have oversold the idea that VPNs are the end all for security, right? They just wrap you in this blanket of anonymity here. Have a VPN. And then they, you know, NordVPN more famously reached out. They reached out to me quite a few times. I didn't buy into it. I didn't like their marketing and they were really trying to throw a lot of money at me. And the dollars kept getting bigger and bigger. And I just said, it isn't really worth me to read this ad copy to try to make this claim that Nord VPN is amazing because it will amazingly do your privacy, blah, blah, blah, just by wrapping you in this VPN. I'm much more realistic. And I think any of these companies have to be looked at carefully, but none of them can truly be trusted. The more reality of why you have a VPN. Well, if you're thinking about privacy and that's what you were sold on, I'm sorry, you were kind of sold a little baloney here. You're just kicking back down the road. Like I said, who the privacy is you've hit it from your ISP. So you've, you've thwarted AT&T and Comcast attempt to monetize anything that they can see going across the line, only to then get monetized by the company that you're paying to stop them from monetizing. If that's what you want to do, if you want to be honest, the most of the time people are doing a VPN is because they're torrenting copyrighted materials and therefore want to hide from the places that will subpoena you for torrenting copyrighted materials and downloading them. That's the realistic reason people are doing it. I'm just going to throw it out there and whatever. I'm not here to pass judgment on any of those practices and things like that. But so my thoughts on a merger is for now I will leave up private internet access as an option for people who want to do the affiliate. I don't, as a matter of fact, I have an account with them that I have used myself. And I don't think that their partnership with them necessarily means something nefarious is happening that isn't happening with any one of the other companies. And I'm sure this will be a controversial topic and people are going to send me a bunch of links that are thought spirals and of, but you can trust this company, but you can't trust this company. And as a matter of fact, in this research, I found a website that seems to be almost dedicated to conspiracy theories about VPNs, which I thought was kind of funny, and also a useless waste of time. I didn't find any real valuable information on there when I was doing the searching. But boy, there's a lot of people that love to debate it. So my thoughts are one, if you're going to use a internet company for hiding things in a VPN, private internet access, they give you OVPN files. This is nice. You do not have to load any weird software to get the VPN to work. I would not ever consider any company and I don't have a list of which ones to and which ones don't, but I do know private internet access does not require you to load any software. They do have software you can load that will do the install, but they give you standard OVPN files. Therefore, you don't need to load any special software. This is how the companies would get spire onto your computer is by having you load some weird utility that they embedded things in there. I would avoid that no matter who the company is. That's one of the reasons that private internet access, because I've set them up inside a PF sense. I've got several videos on it. They're pretty straightforward. They're pretty popular company. They donate open source projects. I am hoping that continues with their relationship with Cape Technologies, who used to be called crossrider and did kind of a branding change to distance themselves from the problems they had with installing some type of spire on computers. But not to get too far off topic. I just like I said, can't trust any of these companies. I don't particularly look at VPN as the end offer privacy, but yeah, probably you can hide from some of the copyright agencies or get around certain geo restrictions that have been placed upon you based on your country of origin and whether or not you're able to view some type of content online. So those are valid use cases for VPNs, but don't buy into the privacy of it. Don't buy into the fact that this will make you somehow completely anonymous or whatever. And also just don't run around doing terrible things on the internet and being an awful human being. And we've seen many instances where VPN companies have complied with subpoenas and such. So that's my thoughts on this for now. I'll leave this up there. And we'll wait and see if they try to do something terrible or if they quit donating to open source projects and I'll revisit it. But just because of their merger doesn't mean they will also related to this Cape Technologies being a company that plans to make more money. They know that if they got caught doing this again, they would not make money with the product because someone would go to some other product. So there is a balance that which they will be reached to figure out how much money they can make if they were to do it and how much money they would lose by losing clients and they may just be an investor like it says here in this well, you know, they wrote out there are usual our merger doesn't mean any change for the company, but I think every company says that. But it's a wait and see sometimes it's true. Sometimes it's not true. You can't just assume automatically even though they are not a great company. One of the examples I'm going to give you that we're waiting for the ball to drop several years later is LastPass. Since their purchase, they've actually given away more for free and they did double the price. They raised it like $20 a year or whatever it costs now for one of the premium versions of it. And it's one of those weird cases where the company didn't destroy the product even after several years have passed. So it's not that there's a cookie cutter history even though a company logged me in has destroyed companies they purchased before. It doesn't always mean they will. And the same thing I'll give these guys time, wait and see. I watch and judge based on actions and not make always presumptions based on histories of products on there. So take it with a grain of salt. Don't buy into the hype. I've certainly never tried to sell you on the hype of VPNs being the end all for all privacy concerns. It just happens to be a product that's really easy to sell on the internet. So they do. There's a lot of money in there. They've seen the gold in it. They've seen the value gold. All they do is spin up some servers, offer some services, get some marketing out there and YouTube happens to be a great way to market it. And hey, people buy our product and we profit. That's the reality of a lot of VPN companies. They're less about privacy, more about investor relations, right? So always look at what people will stand to gain from something. They stand to make money as a business and it's not a bad business for them. And there's valid use cases for VPNs. But just don't buy into the hype. Thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see more content from the channel, hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out. If you'd like to hire us, head over to LawrenceSystems.com to fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. 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