TRANSPARENCY
Everything we know about VPN ownership. Including our own.
This page is updated whenever anything changes. Last updated: March 2026.
WARRANT CANARY
As of March 2026, PlanckVPN has never received a government request, court order, or legal demand for user data.
We have never been compelled to install backdoors, provide surveillance access, or compromise the privacy of our users in any way. If this ever changes, we will remove this statement. Its presence is the signal.
This statement is reviewed and reaffirmed every 90 days.
Who owns PlanckVPN
PlanckVPN is fully and solely owned by its cofounder. There are no silent partners, no investment vehicles, and no corporate parent with a conflicting business model. This will not change without public disclosure on this page.
Who owns the VPN industry
Most VPN companies do not disclose their ownership on their consumer-facing pages. The information below is sourced from public corporate filings, regulatory disclosures, and verified news reporting.
Kape Technologies
Formerly Crossrider — flagged by UC Berkeley and Google as a major ad-injection platform. Rebranded to Kape Technologies in 2018. Taken private by Unikmind Holdings in 2023.
ALSO OWNS
Kape Technologies owns both VPN products and the review sites that rank those products first.
Nord Security
NordVPN and Surfshark merged under Nord Security in 2022. The merger was not disclosed on either product's consumer-facing homepage.
This information is based on publicly available corporate records, SEC filings, and verified reporting from The Register, Cloudwards, CyberInsider, and VPNpro. PlanckVPN makes no claim of wrongdoing by any of these companies — we present ownership facts because we believe users deserve to know who controls the tools they trust with their privacy.
The free VPN problem
Research by the Tech Transparency Project found that 1 in 5 of the top 100 free VPN apps on Apple's US App Store are secretly owned by Chinese companies, with over 70 million combined downloads. Some of these trace back to Qihoo 360, a company designated by the US government as a Chinese military company.
PlanckVPN's free tier is funded by ads through Google AdMob. This is disclosed openly. We do not sell user data, route traffic through unknown infrastructure, or obscure our ownership behind shell companies.
If you are using a free VPN whose business model you cannot explain, that is worth investigating.
How PlanckVPN works
Protocol
WireGuard
Open-source. Approximately 4,000 lines of code — small enough for independent security researchers to audit. We did not build a proprietary protocol and give it a brand name.
Logging
Zero
We do not log VPN traffic, browsing history, DNS queries, IP addresses, or connection timestamps. Our architecture is designed so that this data is never written to disk.
Free tier funding
Google AdMob
Our free tier displays ads through Google AdMob. AdMob uses device identifiers for ad targeting. This is separate from your VPN tunnel activity, which we never see. Premium tier has zero third-party SDKs serving ads.
Our commitments to transparency
—Any change in ownership or corporate structure will be disclosed on this page before it takes effect.
—Any government request for user data will result in the removal of the warrant canary statement in Section 1.
—Any change to our logging policy will be disclosed in the app and on this page with a minimum of 30 days notice.
—Any change to how the free tier is funded will be disclosed before it takes effect.
—This page will be reviewed and updated every 90 days minimum.