Nym CEO Harry Halpin hopes his ultra-private VPN will be his killer app. .
There’s an old saying among marketers, “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.” Over the past two decades, “free” internet services like Google and Facebook have built giant innovative businesses by essentially selling their customer data to advertisers.
Virtual private networks (VPNs) are far more insidious. These products are marketed as a simple way to browse the internet privately, free from governments and companies’ prying eyes. They are widely used by corporations to protect proprietary information. The market for VPNs surpasses $50 billion with more than a billion people worldwide are using these cloaking applications. However, talk to industry leaders like Roger Dingledine, founder of the Tor Project, whose website promises “You have the right to browse without being watched,” and you will soon find out that most VPNs are private-in-name-only. “It all comes down to privacy by promise,” says Dingledine, “There is no way for you to know if we're screwing you.” Key privacy threats, according to Dingledine, include a company keeping a log of user activities, even if it promises not to, and the ability of VPN operators to monitor traffic flows to deduce when a user visits a website.
Nick Percoco, Chief Security Officer at crypto exchange Kraken, began working with VPNs over 20 years ago. At the time, they were primarily a business-to-business product, used by organizations requiring increased security in online communications, such as banks. Percoco points out that VPN issuers started to monetize ‘privacy’ by marketing their products to consumers. “People started to equate having a VPN on my phone or my computer as super secure and ultra-private,” says Percoco.”You're just teleporting yourself to some arbitrary point on the internet. We know that over the years, many VPN companies record what their clients are doing and sell that data to people.” One such provider called “Hide My Ass” requires users to take extra steps to stop the sale of their data. Not exactly privacy by default.
Since many people don’t value privacy enough to pay for it, VPNs sell customer data to fund........