When using a VPN service, you entrust your entire traffic to a single company. This company reroutes all your traffic to give you the advantages of spoofed IP address, encrypted connection, and uncensored internet. However, these advantages come at the cost that you are to some degree at the mercy of your VPN provider.
It is undisputed that the benefits of a VPN greatly outweigh the risks. But it is still worthwhile to take a closer look at the business ethics of VPNs. Shockingly enough, the VPN business makes up for some of the shadiest online companies. Yes, in a market advocating trust, privacy, and security, businesses do, concerning the business practices, not live up to the claims. Read below to learn about some of the most common lies in the VPN industry:
Affiliates
VPN companies use affiliates for advertising their services. Affiliates usually get a generous financial kickback for every signup they generate. Affiliates-marketing is an easy and cheap way for a company to grow sales and is not per se a problem. However, affiliates often engage in misleading customers, spam social media and e-mails, and run smear campaigns against other VPN providers, e.g., when PrivateInternetAccess distributed lies about ProtonVPN
No logs
The “no-logs” claim is an absolute standard in the VPN business. It means that a company is not keeping any logs or storing any other data on the VPN servers. I mean, who wants a company to keep track of what you do online? Not a lot of VPN users… So companies that openly advertise that they keep logs are at a disadvantage, I get it. But unfortunately, it has been shown over and over again that many VPN companies just claim to have a no-log service, while in fact, they don’t. While no-logs sounds super easy, in fact, it is not. It requires some extra effort from your side, from the data center, the software, the employees and so on. While no-logs sounds like default, it is definitely not. Depending on the jurisdiction of the VPN company, no-log services might not even be legal. Therefore, we can still assume that a large number of VPN providers just claim to be no-logs for business purposes but have not invested the time to make it no-log.
Tracking
Privacy-conscious users make up a significant fraction of VPN customers. For many, no-logs is a must and tracking from the VPN provider a no-go. I agree VPN providers have access to the entire traffic of a VPN user, and while some parts of the traffic are encrypted, the amount of data available is still dizzying. Privacy protection as a service is also part of the sales pitch of most VPN brands. I found an article on how to protect from tracking through Google on the website of a very renowned VPN provider. Sadly but not unsurprisingly, I also found a Google Analytics script on the exact same site. I guess a reasonable start would be to protect their users from their own services..?
White label solution
Running a VPN service is neither cheap nor easy. Especially, when you are running a no-log VPN service on dedicated servers, adequate resources are needed, as we know first-hand at SnowHaze. Many of the numerous VPN services are mere white-label services that license from wholesale VPN solution providers. In the white-label solution market, there is one (and only one) thing that matters: price. VPN providers that opt for white-label solutions, usually opt for the cheapest ones. These, however, rarely meet the privacy and security standards that are advertised.
Bought reviews
Whenever you search online for “best VPN” or something alike, hundreds of results with lists like “best VPN in 2019” or “top 10 VPNs for streaming” pop up. What seems like a helpful guide to get the best for your buck is actually paid advertisement and completely misleading for customers. Because most of these reviews are actually paid ones. The more a VPN provider pays, the better it ranks.
Summary
As I show in this article, dubious business practices are omnipresent. There are a staggering number of players in the VPN market that concentrate on phony advertising instead of providing a high-quality product for the customer. It is difficult for an advanced VPN user to assess the quality of a service, and it is nearly impossible for a novice user to do so. With the high competition in the VPN market, many successful companies focus on cutting the cost of the service with implications on privacy and security, to then spending the profits in dishonest marketing.
We know that the VPN market is oversaturated. There really is no need for just another VPN service. That’s why we decided to do it differently. Many VPN companies do not live up to their claims.
- That’s why we decided to create the first VPN with privacy by design – our users can verify that we keep what we preach.
- That’s why we don’t have user accounts – we know nothing about our users and hence cannot leak or log anything.
- That’s why we refrain from dubious marketing practices – we instead spend our money on improving our product than paid reviews.
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