I honestly want to agree with HN on this, but then Im reminded of the constant support for Apple on here, despite the fact that they have violated user trust on numerous occasions, while PIA has not.
So I did some checking:
* Teddy Sagi is a entrepreneur. To say that he is an ex spy is a gross misstatement. Yes, he worked as a developer in Israeli SIGINT program - so do a lot of developers who work for any number of government contractors in US with security clearances working in SIGINT. Does that make them all spies? If you wanna believe in the conspiracy that all the Unit 8200 graduates who have gone on to found Silicon Valley Companies are still state sponsored, then man, you gotta start boycotting all your popular software (and some hardware), cause Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Facebook all have a hand in buying these startups.
* Crossmark, the company that Kape originaly was, had malware which is the equivalent of ad supported app on your mobile device - it was bundled with some software (much like Oracle used to bundle Adware with the Java installer), and injected browser traffic, while sending user information back, perhaps for better targeting This is a far cry from actual nefarious malware. Bad? Yes.
* Kape technologies is under the lead of a new CEO that was responsible for transforming the company away from Crossrider towards cybersecurity. Again, if you want to believe in a conspiracy theory, that is your choice.
* All other Teddys ventures since Kape are in the advertising space. There is a concern that can be made that perhaps advertising is going to sneak in to PIA, but lets cross that bridge if it actually happens.
TLDR, pretty much the expected overblown response, which is sadly becoming the standard for HN. By all means, vote with your wallet, but try to keep your voting consistent. Personally, given the web of investors and ownership that surrounds modern tech companies, I do not see any glaring red flags here.
I make no mention of Sagi's background, just his investment choices. Those alone are enough to question the wisdom of supporting any of the businesses with my actual money. Yes, let's have some honesty.
He's invested in : Founding Playtech an online gambling outfit, a credit card clearing company for online gambling, Kape, Stucco Media - Search engine marketing, and several mobile advertising companies. Not a list many would associate with either ethics or privacy. Not a list I want to give money to or see succeed. All businesses built on erosion of privacy. Colour me unconvinced seeing a privacy oriented company joining that particular stable.
CrossRider was nothing like you imply. It was a BHO platform that injected a dll into the browser to allow easier peddling of malware and adware. Why not mention adware? Let's ignore the malware smokescreen you're trying to launch, with them as innocent victim. A platform putting injected adware on my fucking computer is more than enough. Every anti virus and anti malware platform I'm aware of identified CrossRider as a problem, or flagged its shite as "unwanted program".
Not liking that they now have a plan b that is not in an injected adware platform is not "a conspiracy theory". It's simple track record. Given what their first plan did, and how, it'll take considerable effort over considerable time for me to even consider them neutral. They may never reach neutral or "trustworthy" again.
No all his other ventures aren't in advertising. They are in advertising and gambling - funny you don't mention gambling - that, for me, is more than enough for choosing a business to rely on for trust and privacy. I don't want to support those sectors. I don't actually want them to exist. I don't actually trust anyone in the SEO, advertising or gambling industries at all, from Google and Ladbrokes down. As they keep doing the opposite of the ethical thing, consistently and repeatedly.
If PIA, who have built a decent and (as far as I can see) well deserved reputation, want to hitch their future to that. Well it's their disappointing free choice. My money goes elsewhere.
Online gambling is not in any way built on eroding privacy. You are free to not like how the industry knowingly makes money of off addicts (no, no matter how much they say they care about responsible gambling they will not stop problem gamblers more than necessary to comply with the law), but in my opinion that is the only ethics problem online gambling has that most other industries do not also share.
They are as bad as, and often indistinguishable from, the least salubrious corners of online advertising in their tracking and data gathering. Unfortunately their determination to keep feeding off addicts and keep tracking the whales is what has driven their data abuses. Responsible gambling is 99.9% greenwashing. :)
As someone who has worked in the online gambling industry I can say that this article is very outdated and on some points misinformed. Things have changed a lot since 2010, and he is wrong even about how things worked back then.
> It is routine for sites to demand the transmission of passport and credit card scans, drivers licenses, utility bills and other personal documents. All the available evidence indicates that this information is stored permanently.
Only due to the regulating authorities demanding this to prevent money laundering. Collecting and storing this information is just a huge headache to the gambling companies. I know some small companies do it improperly, but if they could chose themselves they would not have stored it at all. I have never heard of any company using this KYC documents for anything other than storing them for possible police investigations.
> As a rule, they don’t. It is extremely difficult to close an online gambling account, and in my experience impossible to have your data deleted.
This kind of BS with making it hard to close accounts was an issue and has been cracked down on. These days it is very easy to permanently close a gambling account if it is Malta or UK regulated at least. If it is not then you can report them and they can get large fines. It is impossible to get your data deleted though since the casino must keep it for anti-money laundering for a long time. Here I do not know how many actually delete anything once their legal time is up.
> [and] fail to notify customers that personal data will be retained permanently even after an arduous process of account closure.”
Yeah, I think the sites should be more clear about this. But I do not know of any industry which does this well.
Edit: About tracking the whales. No, that is not related to any data abuses as far as I can think of. It would actually be better (from a greedy and selfish point of view) for us if we could delete the gambler's data when they delete their account because then they can register a new account and lose all their money again and we could say we have fulfilled our responsible gambling obligations because there was no way we could correlate the new account with the deleted. Tracking whales is usually mostly done with quite simple BI queries and VIP teams doing work manually.
I am not saying data abuses do not happen in the industry, but it is certainly not built around them or close to as bad as e.g. adtech. Actually ordinary online stores seem often to be worse than casinos when it comes to privacy which probably says more about our current society than about casinos.
What you're forgetting to mention is that none of the "improvements" is due to the industry itself. ALL of it has come from government regulation and threats from legislators to ban online gambling unless the casinos clean up their act.
While this fact surely deserves to be mentioned, I think plenty of companies make good PR off complying with legally mandated measures. Doing something good is doing something good, even if you don't want to do it.
Kinda yes, kinda no. While the user account locking and several other things only happened due to regulators there are other similar issues which the industry fixed itself (e.g. intentionally delaying withdrawals which regulators did not give a fuck about but after one company offered it everyone had to) and reducing the number of sensitive documents necessary to collect (the regulators do not give a fuck about user privacy).
How would you make money laundering impossible? If we could we would. Money launders are shitty customers who mostly just rack up tons of transaction fees for us which their losses just barely pay for.
There's a podcast called Darknet Diaries with an episode about this program[1], where the host interviews an ex-member. It's all very interesting, but there's one part in particular where he talks about the reunions that some ex-members regularly attend. It raises questions since many of these people are working in important positions at major corporations that compete with each other and compete with Israeli companies and companies founded by other members of their unit.
It wouldn't be fair to assume any collusion is going on of course, but considering their past in espionage and the military, it's at least worth mentioning.
> you gotta start boycotting all your popular software (and some hardware), cause Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Facebook all have a hand in buying these startups.
You make this sort of action sound out of reach/unreasonable.
So I did some checking:
* Teddy Sagi is a entrepreneur. To say that he is an ex spy is a gross misstatement. Yes, he worked as a developer in Israeli SIGINT program - so do a lot of developers who work for any number of government contractors in US with security clearances working in SIGINT. Does that make them all spies? If you wanna believe in the conspiracy that all the Unit 8200 graduates who have gone on to found Silicon Valley Companies are still state sponsored, then man, you gotta start boycotting all your popular software (and some hardware), cause Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and Facebook all have a hand in buying these startups.
* Crossmark, the company that Kape originaly was, had malware which is the equivalent of ad supported app on your mobile device - it was bundled with some software (much like Oracle used to bundle Adware with the Java installer), and injected browser traffic, while sending user information back, perhaps for better targeting This is a far cry from actual nefarious malware. Bad? Yes.
* Kape technologies is under the lead of a new CEO that was responsible for transforming the company away from Crossrider towards cybersecurity. Again, if you want to believe in a conspiracy theory, that is your choice.
* All other Teddys ventures since Kape are in the advertising space. There is a concern that can be made that perhaps advertising is going to sneak in to PIA, but lets cross that bridge if it actually happens.
TLDR, pretty much the expected overblown response, which is sadly becoming the standard for HN. By all means, vote with your wallet, but try to keep your voting consistent. Personally, given the web of investors and ownership that surrounds modern tech companies, I do not see any glaring red flags here.