Anything but safe: Using VPN can bear immense risks

dw.com

21 points·abawany··5 comments

> Among the apps described as "highly concerning" are Turbo VPN, VPN Proxy Master, XY VPN, and 3X VPN – Smooth Browsing, each of which has been downloaded 100 million times from the Google Play Store. Thus, hundreds of millions of internet users believe they are enjoying a level of security that does not exist.

I've never once heard of any of these. And those download numbers seem more like bots pumping the stats. No way are 100,000,000 humans using "VPN Proxy Master."

This is a low-effort article.

It’s an ad for ProtonVPN

I do believe hundreds of millions of people have searched for "free VPN" in play store, looked at the great ratings, installed one of them and it even worked perfectly so they rate they all 5 stars too and tell everyone at school.

The numbers are so high because the grift works well. Offer a free VPN service, turn it into nodes for your residential proxy network and rent it out for spam, crawling, ddos or whatever.

Forget about schools, manage any large enough corporate environment and you've heard of most of these. The moment management software blocks the install of a product you can expect you expect an angry demand for an explanation, and ive been on the receiving end of such demands for basically every free VPN product ever.

If using a VPN service is deemed unsafe, it's still possible to book your own VM or server with a full root access, and then setup your own openvpn/wireguard connection.

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