The Trouble with VPN and Privacy Review Sites

There’s a massive problem in the privacy world. Websites, social media accounts, and other platforms are constantly popping up out of nowhere, telling you to buy The Greatest Service Ever in order to solve all your privacy woes, whatever that may be. These websites often employ marketing teams to make sure their “reviews” are what you see first when you begin your research. Some of them are even operated by VPN providers themselves, operating under anonymous business entities to hide their bias, or doing it right out in the open, hoping you’ll mistake their advertising-filled press releases and blogs as insider knowledge of the VPN space.

When a seemingly “unbiased review” on a site is merely a paid advertisement in disguise, that website is breaking their reader’s trust. From a consumer’s point of view, affiliate marketing and other paid promotional techniques like this make it near impossible to know when a review is genuine or not.

This isn’t going to be a lengthy blog post on advertising being bad, far from it. In fact, many of the VPN providers we recommend engage in responsible advertising across various platforms. The key is transparency: Their advertisements should look like advertisements, and nothing else.

I’m really looking to take the time here and identify “the bad” sites and resources that use these…