NordVPN gets sued by Torguard over alleged malpractices

[Zephyrs]

Marketing on it's own isn't intrinsically a sign of a shady company. That being said, a company suddenly exploding in 'popularity' while being aggressively shilled by dozens of independent sources using blatantly formulaic scripts is more or less setting a red flag on fire and stuffing it down your throat.

It's a sign that they have gotten a huge injection of venture capital or are using some alternative backend revenue model, which means that the service's quality no longer matters. It's purely about getting as many people using the service to pump and dump with a sprinkling of data harvesting/manipulation on top. Add on the possibility of illegal (or at least grey market) business practices (hello G2A, moviepass, etc), and yeah, I'd say that you are perfectly justified in being skeptical.

Every single of these shilled products has turned into a dumpster fire.

Point blank:If you trust Nord VPN for anything relating to actual security, you're fucking stupid. Bypassing DNS blocks or viewing stuff like BBC's player? Sure. Actual security? Hell no.

[Glitchvid]

It's about threat modelling, if you're Edward Snowden, US public enemy #1, then you might have valid concerns about the NSA coercing VPN providers to collect and give data on you, but for the vast majority of people (who don't even really need VPNs, like honestly I use VPNs more for getting around Comcast's and Verizon's shitty peering more than anything else.) The NSA isn't going to expend the effort to target them. Basically as long as the service isn't an NSA honeypot, and the connection is encrypted (especially E2EE) then you're basically safe.

Beyond that, if you're a legitimate target of the state, VPN+Tor+GPG is basically the name of the game.

[björk]

another use for VPNs is getting around IP-based site bans and sites that track alternate accounts via connection location and I can guarantee you from personal experience that as long as your VPN isn't total dogshit it doesn't matter what it is, just as long as you maintain the same connection server for any service you're in and change it to a different consistent server when you're banned and need to rejoin (in some cases you MAY need to change VPN servers, although waiting a brief period of time between making accounts can also solve that problem)