I am looking more for security for banking transactions rather than privacy. What do you guys think about PIA? Are they reliable enough to secure coffee shop Wifi? Do I have to worry about VPN provider intercepting my passwords and then getting hacked with that information?
They are owned by Kape Technologies, I wouldn't trust them. https://www.technadu.com/which-vpns-are-owned-by-kape-technologies/304917/
Which US or EU based VPN service would you recommend that also provides adblocking? Again, I don't care about privacy issues, this is only for financial transactions.
Having be bought by a company known for having distributed malware and linked to intelligence services, I think PIA (and ExpressVpn, and ZenMate) aren't trustable anymore.
Because ExpressVpn has just been bought by the same shady company (Kape Technologies) as PIA and Zenmate (and CyberGhost). And for making the things worse, the Chief Information Officer for ExpressVPN, Daniel Gericke, has entered into a plea deal with the US government for his role in facilitating the United Arab Emirates in hacking and surveilling state dissidents.
Yuup. This is so true. Also, PIA has been bought and sold a couple of times, so thats's a red flag right there. And PIA also has US juridiction, which is another huge red flag. Any company owned by Kape, run by a guy who used to be a hacker, is a not at all trustworthy for me.
So, what is left? Mullvad and Proton? Anything else that is recommended? I guess it also depends on what priorities someone has .
I have heard good things about VyprVPN. They based in Switzerland and supposedly they are no-log. See here. WeVPN also sounds good, with no logging policies and jurisdiction in the British Virgin Isles.
@mattdocs12345 i'd stay away from these two. vypr in particular. as for the proton see this post by @Minimalist and this post by @Floyd 57.
Oh, I agree! I use Mullvad for a reason, they have been the best I've used. But based on WeVPN and VyprVPN logging policies and jurisdictions they seem to value privacy.
I would had Perfect Privacy to the list of trustable Vpn providers. At least 3 times in the past, some of their servers were seized, but as all their stuff run in ram, nothing usable was found on the disks. They provide adblocking, multi hop vpn connections, and ssh, http squid & socks5 proxies on each of their servers. But PP is not good for accessing to streaming services such as NetFilx, Hulu, etc. Their main goal is..Privacy.
It's an old story. I think it is not the case anymore: Nothing that is said on their forum, none of the messages I ever received by email, comes close to expressing any nazi thought. And one the options of their the "TrackStop" filter integrated in the VPN, blocks fake new sites that are mostly far right in focus. So I really think this nazi story is no more relevant. And their Vpn service is technically rock solid.
IVPN and Mullvad are very good. I dindn't test AirVpn but they seem to have a good rep. And their forum is very interesting. But Perfect-Privacy belongs at least in the same league in terms of privacy and technical features. They are so long on the market and there is still no case where logs or any leaks have appeared, even the couple of times when they have had some servers seized. This is in any case far more convincing in my opinion than the audits that NodrVpn and VyprVpn offered themselves for proving they were not logging.
No one has mentioned something so far. The OP asked about using PIA for banking. Does anyone use their favorite third-party VPN while banking? If you need additional security then the bank should provide it IMO.
There's no need to, as any connections to a bank's website will be over a secured (HTTPS) connection, which means it's already encrypted.
Is best not to use public WIFI for banking transactions. For banking transactions, i trust ISP over VPNs any time.