One of my "favorite" evil business models is Hola VPN (https://hola.org), a free browser VPN extension. Hola VPN users unknowingly become exit nodes for residential IP address proxies for sale at https://luminati.io.
VPNs are often used for piracy, SPAM, and other nefarious purposes while residential proxies are primarily used to obtain access to data through web scraping. Large companies like Google are able to scrape the same sites without getting blocked already, and proxies help to level the playing field between innovative startups and established players. I can certainly understand the critique, but I strongly believe that the existence of residential proxies results in a lot more good than evil.
[1] - https://intoli.com
But since you brought it up, we both know residential proxies are especially attractive to bad actors and circumventors.
It's like how we're both capable of pitching Tor as the emancipator of the sanctioned journalist trying to publish the truth in the face of mortal danger. Yet 99% of Tor traffic to my websites is malicious despite our feel-good hypotheticals.
Of course, residential proxies are even better than Tor because a network can't just block the residential IP address space. ;)
> It's like how we're both capable of pitching Tor as the emancipator of the sanctioned journalist trying to publish the truth in the face of mortal danger. Yet 99% of Tor traffic to my websites is malicious despite our feel-good hypotheticals.
Of course. That's the reality of freedom on the radical edges — bad actors need it more than pro-social actors. Many of us choose to support radical freedom(s) anyway because the capacity for anyone to act* freely is judged to outweigh the negative effects from bad actors.
*browse, post, etc.
> In return for free usage of Hola Free VPN Proxy, Hola Fake GPS location and Hola Video Accelerator, you may be a peer on the Luminati network. By doing so you agree to have read and accepted the terms of service of the Luminati SDK SLA. You may opt out by becoming a premium user.
I dunno, I don't really see what's so very wrong about this, as long as it's communicated clearly.
Exactly. It's not.
Support is okay, not the fastest. Downtime is rare but not unheard of, they've been targeted with big DDoS attacks. Server options expanding but not in tons of countries. Most trustworthy and reputable service because it has a CEO you can actually put a name and a face to, and the history of Protonmail.
I definitely don't trust NordVPN in particular, they advertise their "military grade encryption", and I have no clue who runs it.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/8ww4h2/protonvpn...
What other VPN would you trust? Mullvad, absolutely no clue who runs it. Private Internet Access had claims about logs proven in federal court at some point in the past, but I really still don't trust it.
Running your own VPN is one of the best options but you almost completely lose the relatively reasonable degree of anonymity that VPN providers serve to you. Depends on your objectives.
ProtonVPN's explanation was extremely hardly believable[1].
> Mullvad, absolutely no clue who runs it.
It's clearly stated on Mullvad's homepage[2]:
> The legal entity operating Mullvad is Amagicom AB. [...] Amagicom is 100% owned by founders Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson who are actively involved in the company. The rest of the team includes Robin Lövgren, Simon Andersson, Linus, Richard Mitra, Sanny Mitra, David Marby, Odd, Andrej Mihajlov, Janito Ferreira Filho, Elad Yarom and Jan Jonsson.
At the end of the day, I can't name many (if any) VPN providers that operate their own data center, which is extremely important since they all (including ProtonVPN) lease from the same companies. ProtonVPN does provide Secure Core though (routing traffic through certain countries to attempt to mitigate exit node threats), too.
I wasn't aware about Mullvad, thank you for pointing that out. I still have little clue who those people are, while Andy Yen has given a TED talk, so he has some public presence. I'm personally more inclined to trust them.
Running your own VPN doesn't really anonymize you though. And like you said, depends what you want from the VPN really.
I don't trust anyone who uses "military grade encryption", period, even though it is just a marketing ploy.
ProtonVPN has their own data center of some sort in Switzerland. All VPNs are leasing the same servers from Leaseweb and friends (even ProtonVPN). They say it's in an underground retired army bunker, which sounds good for physical security assuming that's really the case. You never know for sure, but it's better than the alternatives.
VPN companies are notoriously shady, and I only trust ProtonVPN. I believe their service in _some_ respects is a cut above the rest, and I am willing to deal with multi-day customer service responses, DDoS attacks, and the like because of that.
Seems quite knowing to me. That same FAQ page, which is very detailed, even provides an explanation of what permissions are used.