by Alan Macleod
Part 7 - Is Your Identity Safe?
Internet secrecy is a serious business. Over a billion individuals trust VPNs to hide their identities online. However, the background of Kape Technologies, from its beginnings as an adware company spamming users with advertisements to its key figures’ close connections to Israeli intelligence, raises serious concerns about its clients’ privacy.
At best, a worrying set of conflicts of interest arises when giving your data to a company with such an ethical background. But given that many of the key figures highlighted here have close connections to groups such as the Duvdevan and Unit 8200, both of which carry out wide-scale spying operations, and ExpressVPN’s former CTO reportedly working to spy on users and pass that information on to foreign governments, one cannot rule out the possibility that this is a gigantic sting operation to gather data on vast amounts of individuals, akin to what Unit 8200 is already known to do.
While ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate and other Kape Technologies products may well be safe to use, activists and revolutionaries—particularly those who work on issues such as Palestine—should at least know the company’s history before reflexively trusting it.
At best, a worrying set of conflicts of interest arises when giving your data to a company with such an ethical background. But given that many of the key figures highlighted here have close connections to groups such as the Duvdevan and Unit 8200, both of which carry out wide-scale spying operations, and ExpressVPN’s former CTO reportedly working to spy on users and pass that information on to foreign governments, one cannot rule out the possibility that this is a gigantic sting operation to gather data on vast amounts of individuals, akin to what Unit 8200 is already known to do.
While ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, ZenMate and other Kape Technologies products may well be safe to use, activists and revolutionaries—particularly those who work on issues such as Palestine—should at least know the company’s history before reflexively trusting it.
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