posted in Technology

beep@beep@piefed.world
edited

Proton analyzed 7,000+ mobile VPN apps. 64 apps actively collect physical location via GPS or other geolocation, 3 are owned by market research firms, and 85% of them contain trackers.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1366113/proton-analyzed-7000-mobile-vpn-apps-64-apps-actively-collect-physical-location-via-gps

protonvpn.com/blog/vpn-privacy
Proton VPNShady VPNs could be spying on millions of Americans | Proton VPNA new survey of VPN apps available in the US shows that a worryingly large number of them behave in unacceptable ways.
Zarobi@Zarobi@aussie.zone

Replying to @⁨Babalugats@feddit.uk⁩

They listed a few in their article, but yeah a full list would be nice.

Three of the VPN services we looked at are actually owned by market research companies: ‎Phone Guardian Safe WiFi (Sensor Tower), My Mobile Secure VPN (Comscore), and Urban VPN (BiScience, which has been been shown to capture user conversations across several services and share them with AI chat platforms).

In what many could reasonably see as the ultimate act of betrayal, 64 VPN apps actively track your physical location using GPS and other geolocation data. […] These apps include some of the most popular VPNs in the US, such as VPN Proxy Master, VPN-Fast VPN Super, and X-VPN