The owner of this company posted their site here a few hours ago. Was deleted for self-ad, but I found some features interesting.
Some background info on them:
Company referred in the privacy policy is “AUVEZA Marketing B.V.”. Company less than a year old, with 51k EUR assets, and one employee:
AUVEZA Marketing - NL 866637667B01 | Overzicht | Bizzy
If any of you wants to spend 3 EUR, you can also buy the trade register extract: Producten bestellen | KVK
App is around since last September according to version log by Apple.
It seems the founder is “Alessandro De Vries” as per this LinkedIn post: Post by Unicorn Events.
According the other post by @whynotprivacy they are “a small bootstrapped team (no investors, no outside interests)” so I guess that event didn’t go well. Not surprising considering the privacy community would probably catch enshittification attempts better than others, so is not really a good fit for VCs. Still, it tells you about how the no-VC thing they advertise is not for the lack of trying.
I also found some history:
They used to be called “SurfSkip”, a web proxy service seemingly for bypassing blocks in K12 institutions, then turned into a generic VPN service.
Here’s some stuff:
Discord invite with url “SurfSkip” that now points to “WhyNotPrivacy”
Some random repo about reporting their proxies to some blocklist
SurfSkip also had some GitHub presence, which is mostly wiped now.
GitHub SurfSkipTech org
GitHub @SurfSkip aka “alessandro.thegreat” on instagram
Their only remaining repo has commits only from “DaviDecoder”:
DaviDecoder commit
DeviDecoder issue where he identifies whynotprivacy as “my company”, and discord “a.thegreat” as contact method, also complains about “kill switch not really working”.
DaviDecoder also contributes to a GH org named “ThePrivateCompany”, with releases binaries bearing the “whynotprivacy” name: https://archive.md/IJ3nf
So far imo this looks like a one man show, with the bog standard copy-paste VPN feature set, wouldn’t count on it staying around by next year. However, I find the phone number stuff interesting. I don’t know of any long-term phone number masking service available in EU, so it’d be great to hear some reviews, and/or figure out what they’re reselling and how it works in the regulatory environments since some of those countries on their site require KYC for any phone number.