Hi everyone, my name is Andrey, and I am one of AdGuard’s co-founders. Let me please try to address the concerns and do a small Q&A. I see that some people are mentioning the official response to the SetApp blog post that was made in the first months of the war, and a lot of things have changed since then.
No, it does not. We have a small office in Limassol and rent a couple of coworking places in different parts of the globe, but since COVID, most people work remotely. I personally live in Limassol and visit the office daily (although not during summer; Cyprus summers are a bit too hot for me).
Most of the company’s employees relocated in 2022. There were two big waves, one in March 2022 and the other in September 2022. That said, we still have a bunch of contractors that reside in Russia, including part of the support service, a couple of QA engineers, and part of the content management team. As long as it’s not required by law, we’re not going to force people to move out, as we know very well how hard it is. At the same time, we do encourage people to move closer to the head office.
The same way it works in China, Iran (nowadays much worse though; blocking there is insane), or Turkmenistan. The AdGuard VPN protocol was designed to be hard to distinguish from normal website traffic. At the same time, our websites are blocked in Russia. Even adguard.com, the ad blocker’s website, is blocked there for who knows what reason.
No, we don’t. Even though we regularly receive data requests from different authorities, we don’t record logs (in compliance with Cyprus laws) which is why we cannot share anything. We also don’t have servers in Russia (or India, for example), and that’s why we don’t have to comply with their local laws on storing data.
Senior employees with high access rights do not reside in Russia. However, I don’t say this is a guarantee (and I wouldn’t focus on just one country authorities here btw).
That’s why we seek solution in the transparency of our software. When it’s possible, we make it open source. When it’s not possible, we try to explain how to audit it. We document every bit of information that’s sent to the servers, answer any questions when asked, and don’t hide information.
Our transparency is also the reason why we’re sometimes criticized for our origin. If for 15 years that we were developing software this is the only problem with AdGuard then I can live with it.
Local sales in CIS countries are the responsibility of the distributors from other CIS countries (Kazakhstan, for instance) that can accept payments from there. AdGuard, of course, does not (and technically cannot) have any bank accounts in Russia. It is allowed to sell VPN software to regular people there, but I don’t think it will be like that forever.
Selling a company is quite a slow and problematic process. This is one of the reasons why now 100% of AdGuard company belongs to me and he is not a shareholder.
Anyways, thanks for the questions! This topic pops up here and there, and I never had a chance to address all these points properly.
I hope that our policy of being transparent at least makes it easier for the readers to make a choice. What choice you make is up to you; I am here just to answer questions.