On its website, NordVPN presents itself as a customer-oriented company that was started by four childhood friends who wanted to make Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a truly open internet a reality. What you won’t find on the website is any information about the owner of Nord VPN. This important information was first officially disclosed by Nord VPN in a blog post refuting allegations that NordVPN is involved in data mining.

Why would anyone think that NordVPN is involved in data mining? Because its real owner is Tesonet, a company that runs web data extraction products and services under the OxyLabs brand. OxyLabs owns a residential proxy network with ten million residential IP addresses from more than 180 countries, and it sees the web as the most extensive intelligence data source in the world.

How does this information affect the users of NordVPN? It doesn’t really. Just because Tesonet owns NordVPN doesn’t automatically mean they’re using it to mine data and sell it to the highest bidder. It’s very common for successful companies to acquire smaller companies and let them do their own thing, which is exactly what Tesonet has been doing with NordVPN. So, if you’re a NordVPN user, you have absolutely nothing to worry about because NordVPN is based in Panama and Tesonet, which is based in Lithuania, doesn’t influence its day-to-day operations in any way that should be a reason for concern.

To use NordVPN on a Mac computer, you first need to decide how to connect to NordVPN servers. You have two basic options:

• • Option 1: Use the built-in Mac VPN client.

• • Option 2: Download the NordVPN app for macOS.

The biggest advantage of option 1 is that you don’t need to install any additional software on your Mac. You can simply click on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your Mac, open System Preferences, go to Network, and click the plus symbol to create a new VPN connection. You will be asked to provide the IP address of the server you want to connect to, along with your username and password. To obtain an IP address of a NordVPN server, visit the server recommendation page and let NordVPN’s smart algorithm select the best server for you.

If you would like to use more than one VPN server (NordVPN has over 5,000 fast servers in 60+ countries), you’re better off installing the NordVPN app from the Mac App Store because its polished user interface makes it extremely easy to establish a VPN connection. All you need to do is pick a location on a map and the app will take care of everything for you.

TAP driver provides a virtual TAP device functionality on your computing OS (such as Windows). This driver is required by the NordVPN to function properly, and problems with it can cause the TAP driver error when connected to a VPN.

This is what you need to do to fix the TAP driver error:

• • Open NordVPN.

• • Navigate to Settings -> Show advanced settings -> Diagnostics -> Run Diagnostics Tool.

• • Select the Collect Diagnostics and follow the instructions to complete the process.

• • Open your NordVPN installation folder and look for a .zip file called something like 2019-08-02 12_14_18Z-logs.zip.

• • Extract the .zip file and open the .nwl file it contains in your favorite text editor.

• • If you see the “FATAL:All TAP-Windows adapters on this system are currently in use” error message, disable your internet adaptors and enable them again.

• • If you see the “FATAL:There are no TAP-Windows adapters on this system,” error message, reinstall the TAP driver on your system. You can find working TAP drivers on NordVPN’s website.

When they encounter the TAP error, many people assume that something is wrong with the NordVPN app, but that’s rarely ever the case. Reinstalling the NordVPN app won’t solve the issue, but the two methods described above are guaranteed to work.