Picking a VPN to trust is a problem, but as demand grows, there's incentive for the industry to outgrow its Wild West phase and develop industry standards
Virtual private networks are now a must-have privacy tool. But good luck figuring out which ones will actually make you safer. Tweets: @boblord , @henrygrabar , @abenedikt , @lousylinguist , @gadyepstein , @profcarroll , and @willoremus Tweets: Bob Lord / @boblord : I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me (with technical details and citations) why the average person running a fully patched OS and browser needs a VPN in 2019. http://slate.com/... Henry Grabar / @henrygrabar : “They are very quick to pull out knives and shiv each other.” http://slate.com/... Allison Benedikt / @abenedikt : This is a fascinating piece about the shady world of VPN providers, which is not something I thought I would be interested in, but I was wrong! http://slate.com/... Thelousylinguist / @lousylinguist : “Steer clear of free VPNs” - there are no easy answers in this article, but illuminating. http://slate.com/... Gady Epstein / @gadyepstein : Is your VPN secretly Chinese-owned? Something China journos have long worried about. This v good article will not reassure you... http://twitter.com/... David Carroll / @profcarroll : I use @ProtonVPN which is very costly. It's probably a luxury VPN. But realize you are paying for both a robust technical feature set and a legal jurisdiction that grants you data rights. It's the Swiss bank account of VPNs. Most other VPNs are a scam. http://slate.com/... Will Oremus / @willoremus : I wrote about how VPNs are on the verge of going mainstream... and the one, big thing that's holding them back. In short: A lot of them are shady af. http://slate.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Slate's 2019 piece lands mid-arc in a decade-long shift: VPNs began as niche tools for circumventing Netflix geo-blocks, then went mainstream as must-have privacy software just as researchers found the market rotten — a study of 283 Android VPNs found 18% didn't encrypt traffic at all and 75% embedded third-party trackers.
The years after the article validated its 'Wild West' framing rather than resolving it: reporting surfaced providers like Kape Technologies owning both VPNs and the review sites that rank them, and top apps with 100M+ downloads were later found misleading users while disguising their ownership. The trust problem Slate flagged turned out to be structural, not transitional.
First-order effects
- Users shopping for a VPN in 2019 have no reliable signal to distinguish real protection from marketing, since independent audits barely exist and Bob Lord's challenge — whether a patched OS even needs one — goes unanswered by vendors.
- Reputable operators like Geneva-based Proton are forced to compete on verifiable transparency against free services whose business model is the user's own data.
Second-order effects
- Ownership opacity poisons the recommendation layer itself: when a provider also owns review sites, as with Kape Technologies, every comparison chart becomes an ad, pushing buyers toward word-of-mouth or open-source alternatives.
- App stores and platform gatekeepers face pressure to vet VPN listings more aggressively, since the worst offenders — unencrypted traffic, hidden China ties — surface in the highest-download apps they distribute.
Third-order effects
- If demand keeps growing, the industry's path out of the Wild West runs through third-party audits and standardized disclosure of ownership and logging practices, turning 'trust me' claims into checkable credentials.
- Privacy tooling consolidates around a small set of credentialed providers, while censored markets like Russia — where Proton has been blocked and fighting back since March 2022 — make provenance and jurisdiction part of the product.
The trend: Consumer privacy tools are professionalizing under demand pressure, with verified trust — audits, transparent ownership, honest logging claims — replacing marketing as the competitive battleground.