![]() If a company doesn’t expect and enforce certain standards from their affiliates (not spamming, not breaking copyright, disclosing who they are, etc), they are approving these methods, and are not worthy of your trust. Affiliates, like anyone entering into a business relationship with someone, agree to certain terms put forth by the service hiring them. They often will claim that it’s just the affiliate doing this, and that they can’t control what others do. If you see a service appear over and over again on the kinds of sites mentioned above, there is a good chance they are making money from, and are perfectly okay with these kinds of deceptive practices as a part of their business model. Note that not all affiliates have to be bad actors and simply having an affiliate program is not necessarily grounds for mistrust of a VPN, but rather when those services allow their resellers to generate referrals by hook or by crook. There you can find information on services that have affiliate programs, the specific policies they have for them and whether or not the affiliates act ethically, essentially what the services tolerate from those representing them, when it comes to persuading YOU to buy into the information they put out. I purposefully made a point to capture this kind of data on my VPN Comparison Chart. The technical term for this kind of marketing is “native advertising” and it’s abuse is a huge problem in the VPN industry. They are beginning their business relationship with you, with what essentially amounts to a lie. The sites making these recommendations are, in almost every case, paid by the services they review and recommend. You may even be coming here for confirmation of what you were told on those sites. if you had, you would have gotten page upon page of what seem to be harmless review sites, top 10 or blog style reviews of different VPN services. You may have started your search for a VPN by looking for “VPN Reviews” in your search engine of choice. However, transparency comes before trust. Because we depend on each other for direction and others to write software and run services to help keep us secure – TRUST AND TRANSPARENCY – are paramount. They set out on a pilgrimage of sorts to educate themselves and learn about tools to help them protect it (as I did when I started my project). Some people eventually notice this and discover that they do value their own. We live in a society where privacy is undervalued and under assault daily. ![]() This applies to every company, but I would suggest especially so for VPNs. I’ll get more into this in the “Privacy” section, but it’s important for everyone to be exposed to it at least a little.Ī preface regarding privacy and trust, from a Reddit thread I made a while back. Even if you’re only concerned with geo-unblocking or other non-privacy uses, keep reading. No matter what reason you want a VPN, you want to know that the service you choose is trustworthy and is not compromising your data. This will be heavily emphasizing the need of a VPN for privacy, but I will echo and expand on other use cases as well towards the end. I’m assuming that if you’re reading this far, you have at least SOME knowledge as to the basics of what a VPN is, so I won’t cover that here. I very well might have forgotten to add a section I intended to, said something that needs clarification, or was just sleepy when I wrote parts of this guide, so I intend to update and expand it as needed. The following is intended to be a detailed guide to answer the question, “How do I choose the best VPN (for me)?” The reason this is a hard thing to help people with, is that their needs and level of technical knowledge vary greatly – there is no one perfect VPN, they all have at least some flaws and some will just flat out be better for different people. IF YOU’RE CONCERNED WITH BYPASSING RESTRICTIVE NETWORKS ![]() If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this topic, read on, and buckle up – this is going to be long. If you just want an ELI5, read the bolded segments throughout the guide for the highlights. Much of this guide is relevant and therefore repeated in the other guides I have on That One Privacy Site. ![]() I reference my VPN Comparison Chart throughout much of this post, not so much for shameless self promotion, but because I believe it to be a solid resource to determine if a VPN meets your criteria and to assist you in deciding which is best for you. That One Privacy Guy’s – Guide to Choosing the Best VPN (for you)ĭisclaimer: The below guide is my opinion, which I will try to provide as many examples for and as much evidence as possible to support. ![]()
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