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Many Free Mobile VPN Apps Are Based In China Or Have Chinese Ownership
A new study has found that more than half of the top free mobile VPN returned by Play Store and App Store searches are from developers based in China or with Chinese ownership, raising serious concerns about data privacy. "Our investigation uncovered that over half of the top free VPN apps either had Chinese ownership or were actually based in China, which has aggressively clamped down on VPN services over the past year and maintains an iron grip on the internet within its borders," said Simon Migliano, Head of Research at Metric Labs, a company that runs the Top10VPN portal. ZDNet reports: The researcher says he analyzed the top 20 free VPN apps that appear in searches for VPN apps on the Google and Apple mobile app stores, for both the US and UK locales. He says that 17 of the 30 apps he analyzed (10 apps appeared on both stores) had formal links to China, either being a legally registered Chinese entity or by having Chinese ownership, based on business registration and shareholder information Migliano shared with ZDNet.
The expert says that 86 percent of the apps he analyzed had "unacceptable privacy policies." For example, some apps didn't say if they logged traffic, some apps appeared to use generic privacy policies that didn't even mention the term VPN, while some apps didn't feature a privacy policy at all. On top of this, other apps admitted in their policies to sharing data with third-parties, tracking users, and sending and sharing data with Chinese third-parties. Almost half of the free VPN apps also appeared to take the privacy policy as a joke, with some hosting the policy as a plain text file on Pastebin, AWS servers, or raw IP addresses, with no domain name. In addition, 64 percent of the apps also didn't bother setting up a dedicated website for their VPN service, operating strictly from the Play Store.
The expert says that 86 percent of the apps he analyzed had "unacceptable privacy policies." For example, some apps didn't say if they logged traffic, some apps appeared to use generic privacy policies that didn't even mention the term VPN, while some apps didn't feature a privacy policy at all. On top of this, other apps admitted in their policies to sharing data with third-parties, tracking users, and sending and sharing data with Chinese third-parties. Almost half of the free VPN apps also appeared to take the privacy policy as a joke, with some hosting the policy as a plain text file on Pastebin, AWS servers, or raw IP addresses, with no domain name. In addition, 64 percent of the apps also didn't bother setting up a dedicated website for their VPN service, operating strictly from the Play Store.
I've done absolutely NOTHING wrong & just try to make everyone's lives better w/ my work that stops ads & malware.
... he says, between rounds of changing his apparent IP address to evade Slashdot's filters so he can spam the hell out of so many discussions. Your free hosts program is a product. You are sending unsolicited messages promoting that product. You are a spammer. Giving a spammer a hard time is not "bullying", it's a reasonable response. It's like complaining "that guy kicked my ass, what a bully! All I did was walk up to him and punch him in the face, why is this happening to ME?!"
If you're catching so much flak why don't you go someplace else? I never understood this insistence of some people to be where they are not wanted. Life is too short to waste your time and energy like that.
Have you ever been diagnosed by a licensed professional with any kind of mental/emotional illness? In the past you seemed reluctant to directly answer that question with a "yes" or "no". Your behavior suggests that perhaps you should be evaluated by a licensed therapist.