this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Privacy

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MEGA, the "privacy company," is now based in Hungary, via MEGA Privacy Kft in Csomád. Found this out on their "About us" page.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

That's not a real office address, if you search for the full address you will get a lot other companies as results.

So that's an address of a "headquarter provider" company, they are very common in Hungary. In Hungary companies have to pay different taxes based on where their HQ is, and taxes are lower in small villages like Csomád. I don't know how common is this elsewhere.

Here is a G* streetview of the house: https://maps.app.goo.gl/sQW19pN3c1m4qFuH8 But this should be irrelevant, just to see it's not even an office building

So they just have a Hungarian shell company? From publicly available local data I found, the company was established on 2025-02-27, with less than 10000 EUR capital.

Maybe they needed it to more easily operate in the EU?

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 days ago

It's pretty common in the US too. A lot of companies are legally headquartered in Delaware. A lot of international companies have their EMEA HQ in Ireland.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was thinking the same thing, but don't they already have a Luxembourg company?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Maybe @[email protected] is right and it's for some tax benefits. But similar companies usually choose Ireland as a European foothold, if tax avoidance is an important factor.

The companies address on the NZ companies' office was not updated yet: https://app.companiesoffice.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/4136598/detail

And as I can see on other sites it's still owned by the same Hong Kong company.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I stopped using MEGA recently, I think it's becoming shadier than ever... Who even owns MEGA at this point? I thought it was the government of New Zealand? Also, seems like they introduced ads into their mobile app, which is unacceptable imo

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Seems like theyve become less and less shady over the years, actually

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Kim left. He was dodgy as fuck.

Code is audited. Audits actually published publicly. And their contents is great. Read it. Very transparent.

They've expanded to include other services. I really like the video conferencing. There's almost no VC solution that has client side encryption only. Almost all the other VC companies can downgrade calls to not having e2ee.

They've had CVEs before. Everyone does. But they responded to them perfectly: accepted responsibility, quickly patched it, and published very transparent explanation of what the attack was and how they fixed it.

If the source code is open and audited, idk what you're afraid of. The fact that everything can't bypass e2ee means its perfect for tech illiterate folks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Didn't know about the ads. Unacceptable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not joking I read it as maga

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

I understand that it was an honest mistake to read as "maga", but you have to stop viewing the world through politics or have a phrase make your mind jump immediately to a political meaning of the phrase

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Kim dotcom always was shady to me tbh

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

He left the company years ago, and told the public it was controlled by the NZ govt.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago

Wow now that's interesting. Well corpo tax is apparently low in here, that might explain why.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I was juuuust about to recommend Mega on my 'alts to big tech' part of my website, then I found this out... nope.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Link to the source.

Update the post. There's a link field in Lemmy.

[–] hellfire103 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

When did they stop being Kiwi?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

When they were bought by a Chinese company.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] hellfire103 1 points 1 day ago

ffs. Guess I'd better move everything off and close my account, then.