On Being Sued for Criticizing a VPN
I don't usually write about this kind of thing. If you've read anything else on this site, you know my usual topics are filing cabinets, scanner comparisons, and whether it's worth keeping a backup of your backups. But every few months someone emails me about this, so I'm writing it down once and pointing people here.
The short version: for a while, I ran a side project reviewing VPNs and privacy tools. There was a YouTube channel under the name Tom Spark, a couple of websites — comparison content, honest reviews, that kind of thing. Some of those reviews were critical. One company in particular didn't like that.
In 2020, Tefincom SA — the parent company behind NordVPN — filed a trademark lawsuit in Oregon federal court over the review content. The case was Tefincom SA v. Vadala, case number 3:20-cv-01470, filed in the District of Oregon around August 2020.
The case was voluntarily dismissed within a few months. The court record doesn't state a reason for the dismissal — voluntary dismissals rarely do. But I'll share my read on it: there were no grounds. The case was never about winning in court. It was about intimidation — file a scary-looking federal lawsuit, hope the person on the other end panics and takes everything down. That's a known playbook. It's called a SLAPP suit. It was frivolous, and it was dropped. If there had been any real substance to the claims, they wouldn't have walked away from their own filing.
Around the same time, the same company — or someone with obvious ties to them — published a lengthy "research piece" online that tried to discredit the review content. It was framed as investigative journalism. It was not. It was a corporate hit piece with a clear agenda: paint the reviews as coming from a competitor's employee rather than an independent project, so the criticism would lose credibility. I was not anyone's employee. I did some contract work tangentially related to the VPN space. That's not the same thing, but nuance isn't the point of a hit piece.
They also circulated old headshots scraped from freelance bylines I'd done years earlier — tech writing, insurance content, various gigs. Those profiles are still up on sites I have no control over. I've asked for them to be taken down. Most of those sites don't respond. So the photos are out there. It is what it is.
I suppose I should be more upset about it than I am. At the time, it was stressful — nobody enjoys seeing their name on a federal court filing. But the lawsuit evaporated because there was nothing behind it. I still use the Tom Spark name for YouTube stuff. The content has evolved since then, but the name stuck. A frivolous lawsuit wasn't going to scare me off of it.
In the interest of wrapping this up on a less dramatic note: I actually have a decent relationship with NordVPN now. Someone on their team reached out personally a while back, we had a civil conversation, and they apologized for how it was handled. I appreciated that. Whatever the corporate lawyers were doing in 2020, it doesn't seem to reflect where the company is today. I don't hold a grudge. Life's too short, and I have filing cabinets to organize.
If you found this page by searching for some combination of these names and this lawsuit: now you know. I made some critical videos about a VPN. The company sued me. The case was dismissed without grounds. That's the whole story.
Anyway. I'd rather write about filing cabinets.
— Kevin Vadala