MYST is now on Bittrex

VPNs Leaked 1.2TB of Your Data: Who Can You Even Trust?

20 Million VPN users across seven different VPN services were compromised and had their data (including personally identifiable information) end up on the dark web.

What do you make of this? Where do you go from here?

Your average tech-bro (and a rapidly growing subset of tech-gals) advise using VPNs and the Tor Network to protect your privacy. But, Tor is not that secure either. It is not the privacy mana that it is made out to be. Just ask Ross Ulbricht serving a double life sentence.

This begs comparison to the facebooks and the Twitters of the world -

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re the product.”

But, people paid for these VPN services and still had their data leaked. This begs another question -

“Is this going to be the new normal? Should we expect our personal data and browsing history to be leaked when we go online?”

Well, the short answer is NO.

But, we should now accept that every company out there shall do something or the other with our data, with our explicit permission (buried in the EULA) or without, unless proven otherwise.

This brings us to the bifurcation in the road and the crux of this edition of the newsletter.

Should you embrace the absence of privacy online because it helps advertisers show only the most ‘relevant’ of ads to you?

OR,

Should you consider this an assault on your inviolable rights because these ads have proven to sway public sentiments and election results?

Well, if you’re reading this, you’re a Hacker Noon subscriber, which makes it a rhetorical question.

You prefer the latter.

This is why, Hacker Noon has struck up a strategic partnership with Mysterium Network - a decentralized VPN provider that lets you run your own node and browse truly anonymously.

Therefore, over the course of the next few months, we’ll be: