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Happy Birthday to Us! ProPrivacy is Five Years Old!

ProPrivacy.com was launched on 19 February 2013, and what a ride it has been! As far as we know, this makes us the longest-running VPN review and comparison website on the internet. And with a whopping 27 million unique visitors on record, we are certainly the most established!

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Our mission statement

Here at ProPrivacy.com HQ, we firmly believe that the popularity of our website is the result of the quality and integrity of our articles, and commitment to our core mission statements.

 

Fighting for a better world

All of our team are passionate about making the internet a better and freer place for everyone. The internet has the potential to bridge divides and unite our fractured world, educate those who would not otherwise have access to life-changing resources, and give voice to the billions who have thus far in history remained silent.

That this amazing potential is being undermined for base reasons is a source of rage to us.

Power-drunk governments have ambitions to spy on everything everyone does in ways that make George Orwell’s nightmare dystopia described in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four look positively tame.

Megacorporations recklessly profiteer from algorithms that attack the bonds that bind communities together, sowing hate, intolerance, and division. All in the name of accumulating huge profits. And it is our personal data that is the resource upon which these companies thrive.

They use sneaky methods to spy on us and track us as we surf the web, in order to build detailed models so that they can target each of us with ever more personalized advertising.

One of the central ideas behind the internet is its fundamentally egalitarian nature. Anyone with an internet connection has equal access to all of its resources and can participate in the global conversation as a citizen of the world. But this too is under attack.

The fight for net neutrality is currently being waged most fiercely in the United States, but its consequences will be felt everywhere. Greedy internet companies who have already successfully campaigned for the right to sell their customers browsing histories, want to carve up the internet into easily packaged pieces in order to maximize their profits and stifle competition (and therefore innovation).

The end result is likely to deepen the digital divide and create a two-tiered internet where the wealthy have unrestricted access to all its resources, while the poor scrape by on cable-style “packages” that only allow access to a select number of services provided by the internet providers’ business partners.

 

ProPrivacy.com is on your side

We are proud to be riding the wave of a technology that can protect us and allows us to fight back against a very dark version of our possible future. Virtual Private Networks and related technologies allow us to experience the web as it should be – unrestricted and without everything we do being monitored and recorded.

ProPrivacy.com was just three months old when NSA-contactor Edward Snowden fled to Hong Kong after releasing a trove of documents that opened the publics’ eyes to the insane scale of mass government surveillance.

ProPrivacy.com’s news stories have fearlessly covered the ever-changing political and technological landscape ever since. From NSA surveillance to censorship news from across the world, from state-sponsored hacking to ever more repressive copyright laws, and from the battle for net neutrality to the UK’s draconian dragnet spying legislation.

And it is not just news stories – ProPrivacy.com offers an unparalleled wealth of practical information and how-to-guides on privacy and security self-defense.

Governments and corporations have proven time and again that they simply cannot be trusted to protect us, so we must learn how to protect ourselves. ProPrivacy.com shows you how.

 

Improving Standards across the Industry

The surge of interest in VPNs and other privacy technologies has created something of an unregulated market in which unscrupulous businesses often prey on people’s lack of technical knowledge.

As the foremost VPN review and comparison website on the internet, ProPrivacy.com is in a unique position to improve this situation.  This is a responsibility we take very seriously and respond to in two main ways.

On the one hand, we educate consumers. Our reviews are not only impartial, but they are detailed and comprehensive. This means that you, the reader, can see how we came to our conclusions about a VPN service, and have all the information necessary to draw your own conclusions.

And as already noted, we publish a huge number of articles explaining everything from how VPN encryption works to setting-up your own VPN server, to recommending open source browsers and end-to-end encrypted email services that respect your privacy.

Indeed, we are passionate supporters of open source projects and technologies such as end-to-end encryption. We view promoting these vital ideas as part of our mission statement.

On the other hand, we use our influence with VPN providers to improve transparency and promote the adoption of robust standards across the industry. A good example of this our recent prestigious ProPrivacy.com Awards, in which we were pleased to find that many VPN providers were keen to improve their service to a standard that would allow us to include them for consideration.

 

So happy birthday to us!

As you can see, we are immensely proud of what we have achieved so far...and we're just getting started! We have big plans for the future! At ProPrivacy.com we are looking after your digital privacy and security in every way we know how, and that will always be the case. Here's to the next 5-years!

Written by: Douglas Crawford

Has worked for almost six years as senior staff writer and resident tech and VPN industry expert at ProPrivacy.com. Widely quoted on issues relating cybersecurity and digital privacy in the UK national press (The Independent & Daily Mail Online) and international technology publications such as Ars Technica.

1 Comment

AnAveragedGuyLivingAnAverageLife
on February 22, 2018
Happy birthday! Thanks for all your informative articles.

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