Your choice is your own, but what made you want to stay with PIA after the takeover?

I let my PIA account expire after the purchase, but there's a reasonable argument for "any shadowy figures siphoning their info aren't in my threat model."

If you're Joe Schmoe who just wants to not get nastygrams over using Popcorn Time or a tweaked Kodi box pulling movies from torrent sites, you may be a lot more concerned about hiding your usage from your ISP than you are from some foreign government that doesn't care about you. For that user, PIA (or ExpressVPN, or NordVPN, or whoever else is out there) may be a perfectly viable option.

I'm not convinced that Kape is a worse owner, the evidence was weak. In addition, they sell privacy. If they stop respecting privacy they go under. If they start storing data they legally have to hand it over when being asked by law enforcement, which would expose that they stored it.

> If they start storing data they legally have to hand it over when being asked by law enforcement, which would expose that they stored it.

Not necessarily.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

This is blind trust, you are relying spotting wrong doing after it happens, at which point you would already be compromised.

Is there any other way?

But we've been shown that storing data is only part of it; if you continue to use the service law enforcement can force them to log you.