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 🌻
It’s Simple as ‘it’s free’. Most people don’t care about privacy, just bypassing censorship. Plus, the majority of people in third world countries can’t afford to pay for a vpn, so they’ll flock towards free ones.
Right they do have a free, rather limited tier. But this still has me shocked that they actually got that many downloads. I’ve now also checked other free ones, and they also have 100M downloads, truly crazy. As these are so far from being good for privacy.
As I said, only very few people cares about their privacy, so it’s not really that shocking. I believe that the people that download these vpns don’t even knows what these companies are doing with their data afterwards. Can’t be scared of something happening to you if you don’t know it’s happening, or even what’s happening in the first place.
The majority of netizens have a privacy literacy problem.
I believe this to be the case indeed
and Nordvpn or Expressvpn isnt even private so… its paid but you still give all your data to them.
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.
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.
That’s my thought, these are worldwide numbers, so while the “premium” VPN services are popular in developed countries where most have the disposable income to afford them, those in developing countries may find the free services much more accessible, even if they aren’t as reliable. Income may not even be too much of a factor, sometimes software or services can get popular in places like India where there’s just a very high population. India played a big part in worldwide desktop Linux growing to 4% market share, for example.