Separately, the PR Manager of Digital and Partnerships at Ivacy was caught offering a VPN reviewer a lifetime Ivacy subscription in exchange for more favorable reviews on his review site. Gaditek owns and runs four VPN review sites, which it uses to artificially rank its VPN products in the top positions without ever disclosing its true ownership.Īlso, the company routinely engages in ‘astroturfing’, creating fake social media accounts to promote its VPN product under the guise of a real person. On top of the secrecy, and more worringly, Gaditek engages in some unpleasant business practices. Gaditek’s disappointing business practices He can also be found replying to VPN-related tweets with recommendations for PureVPN, without ever disclosing that he holds a key stake in its parent business and sister company.ĭespite Ivacy’s attempts to distance itself from PureVPN, there is a definite link between the two companies. However, his Quora account has him listed as ‘Growth Marketing Strategist at PureVPN’. Ivacy CEO Saad Khan’s affiliation with other Gaditek-owned companies. He officially states his position as being ‘Senior Product Marketing Manager at Cloudways’, which is a cloud hosting platform owned by Gaditek. But you’d never know this either, as he does not mention his affiliation to Ivacy anywhere. A spokesperson also let slip in 2018 that the CEO’s name is ‘Saad Khan’.Ĭurrently, we believe Ivacy’s CEO is Muhammad Saad Khan. Ivacy also refused to disclose it to us.Īt one point, the Ivacy website did ambiguously name its CEO as ‘Mr. Several VPN service providers are owned and run by the same parent company.īut Gaditek’s business practices, alongside its reluctance to openly discuss the ownership structure, means we’re suspicious about using Ivacy VPN.įirstly, Ivacy doesn’t name its management team anywhere. There’s nothing immediately suspicious about this. Gaditek was founded by the Gadit family, with Umair Gadit being Gaditek’s current CEO and fellow co-founder Uzair Gadit being the CEO of PureVPN.Īfter years of rumors online, Ivacy finally admitted to this, although claiming its association with PureVPN is “only minor.” In fact, Ivacy is actually operated by a Pakistani organization called Gaditek, which is the same parent company as another VPN we’ve reviewed, PureVPN. “ There is no ethical obligation to reveal who the people behind Ivacy are.”īased in Singapore under its parent company PMG Private Limited, Ivacy is particularly evasive about its ownership and operational structure.Īfter undergoing deeper research into the company’s history, we discovered some secrets around who really owns the VPN service. It wouldn’t unblock Amazon Prime, though, regardless of whether I used the ‘Amazon Prime US’ location or chose a US location manually.You can read Ivacy’s full privacy policy on its website. In testing, Ivacy was able to unblock US Netflix with no problems. Click on one of those and Ivacy will automatically connect to the most appropriate server and then offer to launch the app (or open a browser at the service’s homepage). When you select the Streaming option, you’re presented with a list of services including Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Hulu, ITV and a host of others. We can’t verify how this works exactly: it may use a simple blacklist rather than active file scanning. The latter adds ‘secure’ because it claims to scan all downloads with its own virus and malware scanner at the server level, adding a layer of protection. There are options for unblocking, streaming and secure downloads. You can pick from OpenVPN, IKEv2 and the outdated L2TP encryption protocols, but although I’m told WireGuard is in the process of being supported, there’s no ETA on when it will be ready for use. That’s the same with all VPN services, of course. The links take you detailed setup guides, but making Ivacy work with the Apple TV, Roku and games consoles is a pain and involves sharing the internet connection from your PC or Mac, or using a router that supports VPN connections. The list of ‘supported devices’ is long and include some which don’t natively support a VPN, which is a bit misleading. What’s missing from the apps is an option to automatically start a VPN session when connected to an unsecure Wi-Fi network, and set up a whitelist of trusted networks. On Android, you’ll simply lose your internet connection for any apps running via the VPN. Only in the Windows app can you choose to have the connection “redial automatically” if it drops. Note that there are no options with the kill switch: it’s either on or off. Similarly, there’s a kill switch in the Windows and Android apps, but not in the iOS app. This lets you decide which apps use the VPN and which are routed via your ISP as per normal (and therefore aren’t subject to any slowdown caused by the VPN connection).
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