Disclaimer: I know TurboVPN and the others mentioned are not good services to use, I’m strictly doing research. I’m not looking for VPN recommendations.
Genuinely wondering how these numbers are possible? 300M downloads and 8.35M reviews…? How?! Not even Amazon Shopping app or Disney+ have this many reviews. And surely NordVPN and Express VPN are considerable larger in both users and resources? I’ve never seen a sponsorship, not even once, from Turbo VPN. Are these numbers regional based? Is Turbo VPN more known in other regions? Is it easy to spoof these numbers?
Appreciate any comments on the matter, and have a nice day 🌻
Isn’t that how non-self-hosted VPNs work by their very nature? The VPN owner is always going to know where your traffic originates and where its destination is.
Yes, but some claim to be log-less so while they can see your traffic, they pinky promise not to record it. Proton being one who proports to not keep logs, and seeing as they are Swiss ,that tracks.
(Proton VPN is the 3rd party one I use)
Proton is also a bit shady about their marketing and aren’t really transparent about governments asking for data. It’s also really really expensive for what it is.
That is the tricky part. If you run a public VPN and a governement comes to you and says “give us all you have on user X were investigating them” you sorta have to comply and you cant go telling people that you did that either.
A few of these services will have a line on their website along the lines of “we have never provided data to any governemnt” and when they get told to cough it up they remove the line. Protons data canary has been dead for a long time, and Im not sure if other VPNs even bothered to add something like that.
As for the price tag, I’m paying exactly for that privacy (and also their mail service, de-googling yourself is hard). If I needed a less private VPN I would host one myself.
Not all countries will comply, and not all will require you to stay silent
Signal published their reply to a court subpoena that was funny.
Tor doesn’t because the server that you contact passes it to another and encrypts the data further the exit node can then decrypt it and perform the web request on your behalf without knowing where it’s coming from.
Yes, but Tor isn’t a VPN- the most distinguishing difference being when using a VPN all traffic from your device is sent to the VPN tunnel, while only traffic from the Tor browser is anonymized for the onion network.
Tor acts as a proxy Tor browser is shipped with tor but using a different port. Tor is not the browser.
So as long as you set up what you want to use with tor and remember to start it, it should work. Otherwise I’m sure you could setup a pi or local server to route everything through tor if you wanted to.
Edit: I believe the tor network is a VPN though. Your data is sent privately through the virtual tor network. Not all VPN connections have to work the same, after all Hamachi is also a VPN.