- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Most people turn to a VPN for one reason: privacy. And with its verified badge, featured placement, and 100k+ installs, FreeVPN.One looked like a safe choice. But once it’s in your browser, it’s not working to keep you safe, it’s continuously watching you.
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can we agree to stop normalizing ai slop tho?
“free” vpns and privacy are basically contradictory.
if something is free youre usually the product, especially if the service it requires doesnt use your own resources.
And now I’m gonna blow your mind, the perfect cover: Paid VPN … AND … selling users data. The perfect crime. Who would think a paid service would sell your data? You tried fishing for victims by offering free VPN to sell their data? Have you tried ask for 5 dollars a month and become the cheapest VPN on the market? Double your income and spend 2 third on every youtube video ad and podcast ad to get even more rich!
its why the research part is important. the ones that dont for example may have appeared in court for a hearing by some body of government and had nothing to show in court.
also keep in mind, privacy from government and privacy from corportations can be two seperate usecases. the people who want privacy from government tend to avoid five/nine/fourteen eye hosted servers. ones who want privacy from corporations (usually piracy) only care that the vpn in question does not forward C&D/reveal adress to corporate, or keep logs(as well as support port fowarding)
a paid vpn of course can also sell data. so do dillgence on choice.
“free” vpns and privacy are basically contradictory.
While this has been swallowed as a fact for a few years, it happens to be both not intrinsically true, and can be potentially very dangerous.
It assumes that non-profits and collaborative endeavors don’t exist, where there is no “product”. And it’s like saying networks like TOR are unsafe because they are free.
Someone else already covered the danger of the reverse assumption that “paid” equates “safer”, regardless of what service we are referring to.
People will look for and use “free” VPNs no matter what, unfortunately. So while we can’t guarantee safety for anyone, the least dangerous course of action is to guide people to the least suspect options. e.g. using Proton’s free tier, or Bitmask (Riseup, Calyx) via known open-source clients with known permissions/modes of operation.
As is often the case, clever-sounding generalizations usually end up being shit for advice.
I think what makes “free” and a vpn contradictory is that the infrastructure required to provide a reliable, public vpn is expensive to buy, run and maintain. Even a non profit or other benevolent entity needs to at least cover its costs and that means some sort of income.
And if that income is not from a monetary usage fee there really must be some other catch, be it data harvesting, user side crypto mining, ad injection, or some other, similarly shady thing. Maybe it’s donations by some rich person, but that just puts the organization under their sway indirectly.
This is such a weird outlook that can apply to many many things, including the lemmy instances we are using to communicate this very exchange. I actually would like to see how you’re going to argue that these instances are different, or perhaps not different, in this case.
Running public VPN servers is easier (and cheaper) than you seem to think btw, as long as you don’t promise/guarantee very high speeds for tens of thousands of users.
I mean yeah, i could dig up my old computer and set it up as a vpn. That doesn’t make it helpful though, it is still in my name / using my home connection.
When i say vpn i mean a realistic alternative to existing offers, including a variety of locations and acceptable speeds, as well as the reasonable expectation that my data stays private as long as i don’t engage in wildly illegal activities.
Now for lemmy, the instances are either funded through donations such as the one i use, or are so small that the proprietors can afford to pay for running one themselves. A lemmy instance also doesn’t need to provide broadband speeds and global locations to its users.
the reverse assumption was never claimed to be true though, but yes research is the important step, and often if something is free. Using a tor network for piracy for example is passing off any corporate liability to whoever end tunnel you end up using (disregarding any potential speed penalties you might get hit by). and of course you as a user are only protected as long as the chain of TOR doesn’t for some reason snitch on you.
privacy is a general term but depending on who you want privacy from can differ in usecase
and of course you as a user are only protected as long as the chain of TOR doesn’t for some reason snitch on you.
Off-topic, but how come you don’t know that the whole point of TOR is that, theoretically, the chain can’t (trivially) snitch on you even if it wanted to?
What you describe incidentally can be done trivially with three servers from three good free VPNs, by creating chained tunnels yourself with network namespaces. Which means, taking the opposite of your point, that you can use good free VPNs with very good confidence about your safety/privacy, as long as there is no end-to-end collusion going on.
How stupid can anyone be to install free VPNs
Most teenagers just want to access that porn or piracy site, and mostly don’t know anything about privacy and spyware.
You can try to restrict people to access sites or services, but they always try to find other ways even if that put then in a bigger risk
This is another one of the many reasons the online safety acts a lot of countries are bringing in are going to put so many people in danger. Adults can afford to pay for a VPN subscription, kids are going to download the free ones like this and fall victim to blackmail.
Don’t worry they’re just going to block VPNs too.
