The Shady Business of VPNs

oh no evil hackers and trackers are out to steal all of your passwords and personal data your bank account drained your family homeless and Mark Zuckerberg just left for the Bahamas with all your data if only you were using a VPN ah privacy and security all for $9.99 a month you've all seen the ads you've heard all the claims but despite all the advertising not a lot of people are really sure about what VPN actually do most people just see it as a thing that magically makes you private and secure on online and let you watch that one random Netflix show that isn't available in your country for some reason but do they really do everything they claim to and can you really trust VPN companies with your data most people just associate vpns with privacy and security after they watch too many YouTube sponsor segments but VPN companies aren't telling you everything let's talk about the Shady business of vpns first we have to talk about what vpn's do now I'll keep this brief because you've probably heard VPN explained a million times before B basically when you connect to a VPN you're connecting to another server far away which then makes the request on your behalf and sends it back to you so a VPN is a middleman for your web traffic normally your ISP or your internet service provider can see which websites you're visiting and they might block a website if it's banned in your country or snitch on you if you're torrenting forbidden Linux isos but if you use a VPN all your ISP can see is that you're connecting to a VPN and nothing else it's also a good way to get around GE restrictions and if that's all they claim that vpn's do I wouldn't have a problem but of course that's not all probably the most common reason a lot of people get a VPN is to protect themselves online with all of the scary hackers and evil corporations harvesting your personal data you need a VPN to protect you right after all you can see how much they care about your privacy and security all over their homepages but vpn's tend to stretch the truth a little bit or a lot vpn's claim to make you private online you probably heard that companies can track you by using your IP address and when you connect to a VPN you now show their IP address instead of your own cyber ghost claims on their website that their VPN will keep you Anonymous and your internet activity hidden from anyone watching but let's test that claim out by going to fingerprint. this is a popular service that online trackers use to identify you so as you can see here without a VPN they know exactly who I am but if I turn on my VPN then I basically become like Jason borin Disappear Completely right and I've even opened up an incognito window to clear the cookies so let's now go to fingerprint. comom with a VPN and let's see if they still know who I am and as you can see here they know exactly who I am they even know I'm using a VPN there's no hiding that's because these days online tracking is a lot more sophisticated than just using your IP address come on this is an amateur hour even if you change your IP the tracking cookies are still there and websites can fingerprint You by taking tons of little data points that websites can glean from you they know the browser you use the screen resolution and tons of other little data points that they can put together to uniquely identify you your IP address is just one data point and not even a reliable one anyway if you go from your home to using your mobile data to your Works Wi-Fi you'll have a different IP address in each location but it doesn't matter companies can still track you and if you're logged into Facebook or Instagram of course they still know it's you even if your IP address suddenly changes to a vpn's IP if you actually want to hide your identity online it takes a lot more than just switching IP addresses all the IP addresses that vpn's use are public so these trackers even know if you're using a VPN or not you're not fooling them vpns don't make you anonymous online not even close they also stretch the truth about how secure vpns make you they say if you're on public Wi-Fi like at a coffee shop you're just a moment away from someone stealing every account you own that may have been true years ago but security practices have gotten much better these days now as long as you're using https which you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL or as long as you don't see the giant not secure message you're secure all of your passwords and data being transferred is encrypted modern browsers won't even allow you to visit an insecure HTTP only website without showing you a giant warning sure vpns can encrypt your traffic on public Wi-Fi but it's also encrypted by default on 99% of the websites you use now it's technically possible that some less popular badly coded app might send some data not using https but realistically the dangers of public Wi-Fi are very low these days and for the average user you don't need to worry no need to panic the next time you're at Starbucks and you need to use the Wi-Fi the problem is VPN companies advertise to people who don't know any better vpn's use Scare mongering Tactics like scary ads and pictures of bad guys to scare you into buying their product and they have YouTubers advertise them to a general audience that doesn't have enough technical knowledge to know that they're exaggerating their claims these people don't know any better and just get spooked into buying something they don't need it's so bad that one of nordvpn's TV ads was banned by the UK government for being misleading no the second you leave the house without a VPN you're not handing over every password to evil hackers so that was a very brief overview of what bpn actually do basically what they do is shift the trust instead of trusting your ISP with your browsing history you're now trusting all your data to a random VPN company now they know every website you visit and since you probably signed up with your email and credit card they know exactly who you are but you can trust these VPN companies with your data right these companies will tell you that they don't collect any of your personal data and they all have a strict no logs policy but you just have to take them at their word because they've lied about this before in 2016 IP vanish like everyone else claimed to have a strict no logs policy but when the feds came knocking looking for someone that was using their VPN Highwinds the company that owned IP vanish at the time basically just rolled over and handed them everything that they had about the user and it showed that despite what they said they actually had been logging some user information they had logs of the user connecting to the VPN connecting to an IRC chat server and disconnecting as well as all of his personal information now the user in question was a cheese pizza enjoyer I have no sympathy for him let him in jail but many people use vpns for totally legitimate privacy reasons and if you can't trust them not to keep logs how can you believe anything they say another example is Pier VPN who cooperated with the FBI in 2017 to hand over the info of a stalker and yes they also claim to have a no logs policy now I'm not saying that every company that says they have a no logs policy is lying but there's also no way to verify this for sure you just have to take them at their word some VPN companies have independent Auditors come in to prove claims but logs can easily be turned on at any time so you still have to trust them since these VPN companies have access to this much data about you you have to be aware that they have the potential to do nefarious things with it even if you think they would never do such a thing like it or not they have the power to keep logs about you if they really want to let's talk about some other reasons why you might not trust these companies but we're not going to be talking much about the individual vpns that's because most major vpns are owned by just a few giant corporations over the past few years big VPN providers have been merging together and you probably never even heard about it Cape Technologies own some of the biggest vpns owning expressvpn private internet access and cyber ghost Nord security owns both nordvpn and surf shark zff Davis owns IP vanish strongvpn and encrypt.me among others at first glance this might not sound that bad but what these companies are doing is giving you the illusion of choice you might think there's a lot of competition in the market when there really isn't and the lack of transparency the fact that most people don't know about this it makes it all feel a little bit more deceptive maybe you leave a VPN for some reason only to switch to another one owned by the exact same company another big problem is what happens when the parent company itself is Shady can you really trust any of the vpns it owns let's take a look at one of these giant companies Cape Technologies the owners of expressvpn Pia and cyber ghost because VPN aren't the only things this company buys they also purchased some big VPN revieww websites one website they bought was VPN Mentor now when you go to their website what do you know all three of their vpns are in the top three spots what are the odds oh and this list just happened to change around the time they were bought off by Cape they also purchased whiz case.com and what do you know these three are also the top three here how about one more that one privacy site used to be a well-respected source of VPN comparison that actually had neutral balanced reviews of each VPN but we can't have that it was also merged with safety detectives in 2020 and is now a generic top 10 VPN site and safety detectives is owned by you guessed it Cape Technologies I'll give you one guess as to what the top three choices are now oh of course they all have a tiny advertising disclosure tucked away where barely anyone will see it but the average user is not going to know about the conflict of interest and these kinds of websites are insanely lucrative that's why websell s the parent company of one of these review websites was acquired by cape for $149 million for reference that's more money than Cape paid to buo private internet access on actual VPN which they only paid 95 million for oh I want to hear something funny VPN Mentor even had an article calling out how so many vpns were owned by just a few big companies but it mysteriously vanished after they were acquired by said big company now it's pretty bad when the parent company just buys out all the VPN review websites but independent reviewers can also be very biased just follow the money and big VPN companies have a lot of it a lot of sites literally just sell the spots to the highest bidder the CEO of molad VPN has gotten emails from VPN review websites saying things like hi guys number five spot is now for sale not only that but affiliate marketing can ruin the Integrity of a lot of websites and reviewers some VPN give a bigger cut from affiliate links and if nordvpn gives you the most money are you going to promote the objective best VPN or just the one that pays the most now not everyone is a total sellout but with money on the table it muddies the water that's why I really don't recommend you take any VPN advice from anyone who gets paid by VPN companies either sponsorships or affiliate marketing there's just too much of a conflict of interest and the best vpns at least the ones in my opinion don't have the insane advertising budget that the big players do that's why I don't take VPN sponsorships because then I wouldn't be able to make a video like this it can be hard to tell the truth when when getting the bag might depend on not telling the whole truth when I searched for bestvpn this was the first result I got it took me all the way until ninth place to find a link that wasn't an affiliate link do you think money might influence their rankings at all and privacy tools a once well-respected privacy site as little as two years ago didn't have any affiliate links and mulad and protonvpn were the only two vpns recommended but now they've been pushed down by three affiliate links wow that's a drastic change in opinion got to get that affiliate money and I know VPN companies have to advertise I get it there's nothing inherently wrong with that but many times the financial relationship isn't disclosed or is only disclosed in tiny letters or on a page that nobody will ever visit tucked away in the footer if that wasn't bad enough some of these companies have a pretty shady past let's go back to Cape Technologies owners of expressvpn they weren't always known as Cape they used to be known as cross riter but they rebranded in 2018 because their old brand had strong Association to the Past activities of the company maybe they're talking about how cross Rider became notorious for building software that allowed developers to infect users devices with malware redirect users to advertisers and collect personal data it was so bad back in the day that antiviruses like malware bites and semantic flagged cross Rider software as malware now of course with the rebranding they did a complete 180 and went from producing malicious privacy invasive software to now caring about your privacy and security more than anything can you believe this and I guess that the adwar business was pretty successful for them because they had the money to buy expressvpn in 2021 for almost a billion dollars oh and I can't forget but cross Rider or Cape whatever you want to call them was originally founded by a former Israeli spy you can't make this stuff up co-founder and CEO Kobe menichi was part of Israel's unit 8200 which is essentially Israel's version of the NSA so it came as a huge blow to the reputation of vpns like Pia and expressvpn when cap acquired them but it gets worse it came out in 2021 that a senior executive at expressvpn also formerly worked for the uae's secret hacking team which hacked American machines and surveil targets like political dissidents human rights activists and journalists and expressvpn didn't see anything wrong with this they said they already knew about this when they hired him and in fact it was his history and expertise that made him an invaluable hire for our mission to protect users privacy and security don't they sound like trustworthy people that you want involved with the VPN you use for privacy and security even Edward Snowden recommended people not to use expressvpn after all this came out honestly I could go on all day with all the issues with the VPN industry I can tell you about the time nordvpn got hacked but didn't tell anyone until the details leaked the next year and only after this came to light did they start doing basic security like encrypting the hard disk of each new server we could talk about how these companies care so much about privacy but their homepages are littered with Facebook trackers Google trackers and Bing trackers I can't forgive the Bing trackers are you sure these are really the types of companies that you want to trust with all of your browsing data so we've established that the big bpn companies aren't the most trustworthy but it gets even worse when you start to talk about free vpns not everybody has5 or $10 a month to throw out a VPN and when the average internet user assumes that vpns equal privacy and security a lot of people reach for a free VPN the problem is that most free vpns are a privacy and security nightmare we've talked before about how vpns don't really increase your privacy they just shift the TR to another party and choosing the wrong party to trust with all your data is a big mistake when you don't pay for the VPN how exactly do you expect them to make money well by selling your personal information of course let's take a look at the privacy policy for one popular free VPN Hotspot Shield wow a free VPN with 700 million users 700 million users can't be wrong they tell me to secure my connection for maximum privacy as you can see they care a lot about my privacy that's why they collect tons of sensitive information like your IP address session logs and device details and hand it all over to advertisers and law enforcement basically just forget anything they say about privacy because their entire business model is to track you and send you personalized ads to extract your money if that's not bad enough a lot of free vpns are just literal malware meta published a report in 2022 about 400 apps that tried to steal your Facebook login credentials and 11% of them were VPN there was another study done back in 2016 which analyzed mobile vpns and Android they found that 7 75% of the vpns they analyzed use thirdparty tracking libraries and 82% requested permission to access sensitive information like user accounts and text messages 38% also contained some form of malware and these weren't just bottom ofth Barrel vpns 37% had over 500,000 downloads so kids just stay away from free vpns getting around the block on the school Wi-Fi so you can play Clash of Clans is just not worth it wow at this point you might be wondering is the entire VPN industry a scam mostly but there are some legitimate use cases for vpns maybe you're watching this video from China maybe you want to download Linux isos without your ISP knowing or maybe you're already doing a lot to protect your privacy and want to use a VPN to give you a little more protection by hiding your IP address but it's not something that's magically going to fix all of your security and privacy issues with one monthly subscription if you do use one it's important that you choose a good VPN I'm not going to make any specific recommendations here although you can't tell me to make a VPN TI list in the comments and I might do it but when choosing a VPN choose one that requires as little personal information as possible maybe one that lets you pay anonymously with cash or Monero and never put your full trust in a VPN if you really want to be anonymous online use tour but there is one VPN that really will keep you secure and 100% private online this video is sponsored by

If you want to be private and anonymous online, just use a VPN! Now you're safe from all the bad guys online, right? The VPN industry makes a lot of claims. But are they telling the truth? And can you trust these companies with your data? Support my work on Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/ericmurphy My website: https://ericmurphy.xyz Watch my videos on Odysee: https://odysee.com/@ericnmurphy 0:00 Intro 0:51 Stretching the truth 5:21 Trust issues 7:18 The congomerates 8:19 Conflicts of interest 11:44 Skeletons in the closet 14:03 Free lunch 15:55 Should you use a VPN?