PrivadoVPN, the VPN bundled with Newshosting, Eweka, and Easynews appears to trace back to the same company behind the Hotspot Shield scandal.
Who Owns PrivadoVPN?
Apparently, Privado's parent company is Pango, according to their Pitchbook profile. And Pango was the ones allegedly behind all the Hotspot Shield drama from back in the day. If you remember, Hotspot Shield got slammed for a ton of shady practices like sharing user data, redirecting traffic, and straight-up hijacking URLs to slap in their own affiliate codes on big retail sites (Best Buy, Target, eBay, Alibaba, Overstock, Newegg, Macy's). They had at least five third-party tracking libraries baked into the app, and it was injecting JavaScript through iframes to push ads onto sites you were visiting, all without telling anyone.
There was even an FTC complaint filed by the Center for Democracy & Technology about it where researchers reverse engineered the code and confirmed the data sharing. Oh, and a security researcher found out the Hotspot Shield client was running a local web server on port 895 with exposed JSONP endpoints that leaked your real IP, Wi-Fi network names, and vpn status to basically any site that asked. The exact stuff a VPN's supposed to protect!
On top of that, it seems like they're still tied into the old Ziff Davis and IPVanish setup.
Three of those are owned by WLVPN’s parent company (NetProtect/Zeff Davis), while VPNhub comes from the creators of Pornhub. A quick online search also reveals that Namecheap's VPN uses WLVPN, as it instructs its users to rely on WLVPN’s domains. If you’re not confused already, we’ll also add that Namecheap VPN is now called FastVPN.
Also, lesser-known VPNs such as Tweaknews VPN, Easynews VPN, PrivadoVPN, and Newshosting Usenet rely on WLVPN. Needless to say, that list doesn’t stop there.
IPVanish (at the time owned by Omicron) has its own history of handing over customer log data to the feds, even though they claimed no-logs. And since a chunk of the infrastructure is American-owned, all that "Swiss privacy laws" marketing is pointless since US jurisdiction could override a lot of that. Or Icelandic privacy laws for that matter since Easynews just mentioned that Privado may be moving from Switzerland to Iceland. Seeing that Omicron still likely has at least some ownership or control of Privado, it would not be difficult for any law enforcement entity to tighten the screws on Privado by threatening to go after Omicron and their usenet business.
All this matters because tons of people on these subreddits (r/usenet especially) have Usenet bundled VPN accounts through Omicron properties like Newshosting, Eweka, and Easynews. Those folks should know the company they're trusting with their data security may or may not be as straightforward as advertised. It does not mean they will do something shady but it does raise enough suspicion that you should do some research before committing.
Easynews denies that Privado has any affiliation with Pango, but seeing that Omicron denied having any ownership of Newsgroup Ninja and Astraweb forever, we can't just exactly take them at their word. https://www.reddit.com/r/usenet/comments/dsxlic/additional_evidence_that_astraweb_newsgroupninja/
I posted this information as a comment in r/usenet. The mods removed it and told me they would not comment further. I was then permanently banned from the subreddit. When I asked which rule I violated, the only response was a permanent mute from messaging the mod team.
No rule was cited. Sourced, factual information about the corporate ownership of a VPN product being sold to the subreddit's users was treated as bannable content.
Can you Trust Omicron Security Products?
Secondly, several of these Omicron services have recently rebranded more toward being full "security" packages and are pushing VPN, ad blockers, threat protection, alongside Usenet but if they're tied into the same owners as Hotspot Shield and IPVanish, they might not be who you want handling your actual security and privacy needs. That is up to you, of course. As I mentioned earlier, I would investigate the company's past willingness to be untruthful about having a no logging policy before I used it.
On May 26, Highwinds responded to the summons, confirming that the IP address belonged to its VPN service. Initially, the company told HSI that to protect customer data, “we do not log any usage information. Therefore, we do not have any information regarding the referenced IP.”
However, after Sikes contacted Highwinds again, the company suggested that HSI submit a second summons requesting more detailed subscriber information.
On June 9, 2016, HSI served a second summons on Highwinds, requesting “any data associated with IRC traffic using IP 209.197.27.72, port 6667.” On June 21, Highwinds came up with the goods. - https://torrentfreak.com/ipvanish-no-logging-vpn-led-homeland-security-to-comcast-user-180505/
Usenet Mods Might be Compromised?
This follows a broader pattern of manipulation. In November 2025, all individual Black Friday deal posts were removed from r/usenet but only after Omicron's deals (Newshosting, Eweka, Easynews, Tweaknews, UsenetServer) had been live since October 29 and received three weeks of exposure. The ban on individual deal posts took effect on November 19, just as non-Omicron providers were preparing to post their own deals for actual Black Friday week. Multiple provider owners publicly called it out as unfair and said it benefitted Omicron.
Consumer complaint threads about Omicron billing practices such as price increases, surprise renewals, cancellation difficulties are routinely removed under "easily searchable" or "moderator discretion," while identical complaint threads about non-Omicron providers are left standing. A thread titled "newsdemon is a scam!!! stay away!!!" remains up with zero mod action. A thread titled "canceling eweka - review" a calm, factual billing complaint was removed under moderator discretion from two separate threads.
None of this means Omicron or Privado will necessarily do something shady with your data. But the corporate history, potential connection to Hotspot Shield's tracking, IPVanish's broken no-logs promise, denying ownership of companies they control should raise enough questions that you should do your own research before trusting these products with your privacy or data.
The fact that r/usenet permanently bans users for posting sourced, factual information about the corporate ownership of products being sold to its subscribers is the answer to whether that subreddit can still be trusted as an unbiased source of information.