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Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

zdnet.com

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Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#51

Post by Kaveren »

projectramo wrote: post #45
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #30

VPN just shifts the trust from your ISP to the VPN company. It doesn't matter where they're based. If you pay with a credit card under your real name the burden of risk is always on you and if the company has agreements with whichever jurisdiction you are in then they will collaborate with LE. that said, trust is fickle: The ultimate example of why not to put trust in companies was WoSign/StartCom. WoSign acquired St…

I thought the VPN protects me from US tech firms scooping up my data. Private browsing + VPN means each session looks like a new person and they can’t tie my browsing back to me (pretty innocent browsing but still). Edit: right?

Not quite. Try using Panopticlick [0] for an overview of how your browser can be tracked. Less unique is better. There's also sometimes new methods discovered to track users, but that's not something you would usually care about.

Firefox has good settings you can set in about:config [1].

If you don't have WebRTC disabled, there's a good chance a service can get your public IP address directly.

[0] https://panopticlick.eff.org/ [1] https://www.privacytools.io/#about_config

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#52

Post by klipt »

jobigoud wrote: post #39
forkLding wrote: post #3

Likely the reason why a lot of VPN apps are Chinese is because there is an actual demand for VPN usage in China. You then multiply that with the population size (19% of the world is Chinese or roughly 1 in 5 people in this world) and you will have a massive market to grow for local Chinese VPN developers and for them to prosper. The article author sounds surprised but it is quite logical if you think about it.

How do these VPN bypass the Great Firewall if they are in China?

Some are based in e.g. Hong Kong which is in China but separately administered. (E.g. Chinese residents in Hong Kong are allowed dual citizenship while mainland Chinese are not.)

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#53

Post by jen_h »

Heck, many free mobile VPN apps don't even encrypt your traffic. An analysis of VPN apps on Android done back in 2016 found 84% leaked IPv6, 66% leaked DNS, 38% contained malware...and 18% didn't even encrypt anything...

Study is two years old, but I doubt it's gotten any better. (Source, PDF: https://research.csiro.au/ng/wp-content/uploads/sites/106/20...)

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#55

Post by kakarot »

Kaveren wrote: post #47
kakarot wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mullvad offers unlimited 3-hour trial accounts. A few days messing around with that was enough for me to decide become a lifetime customer. That's the correct model for onboarding with free services, not offering a free service tier with restricted speeds. It's simply stupid as a user to forward all of your traffic to another company for free. Thus any VPN that offers such a service does not believe in fully educatin…

I feel like I could theoretically just spend an hour writing a script to abuse acquiring the apparently unlimited Mullvad trial accounts, and just post it on GitHub. Sounds like a business problem.

You can't be suggesting that the first time someone attempts to do something like this on a large scale, that Mullvad's team would be surprised.

You surely can't be suggesting that this didn't come up in meetings, and that the opportunity cost wasn't determined and taken into account when offering this trial service.

The painlessness of the service, along with the encouragement to generate as many new account numbers as needed while testing, along with allowing full feature access without throttling, meant that I generated two weeks' worth of trials before finally deciding Mullvad was right for me.

But now I know they are right for me, and as I said in an earlier post I am now a customer for life. As long as nothing changes, that will remain so, and I will, as I am now, frequently proselytize their service and encourage others to try them out for free. I'd say they calculated the opportunity cost correctly.

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#56

Post by lrem »

projectramo wrote: post #45
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #30

VPN just shifts the trust from your ISP to the VPN company. It doesn't matter where they're based. If you pay with a credit card under your real name the burden of risk is always on you and if the company has agreements with whichever jurisdiction you are in then they will collaborate with LE. that said, trust is fickle: The ultimate example of why not to put trust in companies was WoSign/StartCom. WoSign acquired St…

I thought the VPN protects me from US tech firms scooping up my data. Private browsing + VPN means each session looks like a new person and they can’t tie my browsing back to me (pretty innocent browsing but still). Edit: right?

Make sure you're not using an operating system that would be unpopular among the IP block you're VPN-ing through. Also, better have the same browser, screen resolution, fonts installed, ...

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#57

Post by h4waii »

thanosnose wrote: post #36

This should be the HN motto: "If you aren't paying for it, you are the product". Also, VPN isn't a magic cure for the disease of privacy violation. You are just choosing to trust the people running the VPN service over the people running your ISP. Should you trust a VPN company more than your ISP? I really can't say, but VPN isn't a magic fix.

Sorry, but this is just not true at all. There are thousands of open (and closed) source projects, software, and services that do not fall under this silly statement.

Does it mean that if you do pay for a product, that you still can't "be the product"?

Blanket statements shouldn't be anyone's motto.

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#59

Post by [deleted] »

kakarot wrote: post #55
Kaveren wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I could theoretically just spend an hour writing a script to abuse acquiring the apparently unlimited Mullvad trial accounts, and just post it on GitHub. Sounds like a business problem.

You can't be suggesting that the first time someone attempts to do something like this on a large scale, that Mullvad's team would be surprised. You surely can't be suggesting that this didn't come up in meetings, and that the opportunity cost wasn't determined and taken into account when offering this trial service. The painlessness of the service, along with the encouragement to generate as many new account numbers…

[deleted]

Re: Many free mobile VPN apps are based in China or have Chinese ownership

#60

Post by Kaveren »

kakarot wrote: post #55
Kaveren wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like I could theoretically just spend an hour writing a script to abuse acquiring the apparently unlimited Mullvad trial accounts, and just post it on GitHub. Sounds like a business problem.

You can't be suggesting that the first time someone attempts to do something like this on a large scale, that Mullvad's team would be surprised. You surely can't be suggesting that this didn't come up in meetings, and that the opportunity cost wasn't determined and taken into account when offering this trial service. The painlessness of the service, along with the encouragement to generate as many new account numbers…

I'm not suggesting that they didn't think of it or that it would be surprising, I'm suggesting that if it were to be abused, it could downgrade the experience of paid users until they noticed and fixed the situation. I just believe that VPNs which offer only some servers to free users or limit bandwith have a good model.
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