People Are Using The Wrong VPN's

If you think that nobody cares about their online safety today, imagine how they were five, ten or even fifteen years ago. Back before the threat of online threat actors were a widely known threat. Well, I guess even nowadays nobody really thinks or cares about what bad actors are doing online – until their identity is stolen because of a data breach and I’m sure even under those circumstances, there are people out there who are going to do absolutely nothing about securing their presence online. I don’t think you need to go all Edward Snowden and start running Whonix or Qubes OS – that’s a little overkill, but hey more power to you if that’s your thing – but people should at least make a few simple steps towards hardening and securing their online lives. Now if you don’t go online or have any need to have an online presence – awesome. That’s literally the best way to stay safe online. Just don’t use it. We all know though, that’s not the case for most people.

If you’re the one person who reads my blog, or whatever you want to call this thing, then you are probably among the small percentage of us who care about, or are at the very least, conscious about your data, privacy and online security. As I’ve said previously, most people don’t give a shit about that kind of thing. That is, not until something happens to them or a close loved one. Then they start thinking “Oh man, I’ve got to do something about this” so what do they do? Why they go and get a trusty ol’ VPN! Their favorite youtuber recommends them all the time and they are the only thing you need to stop those bad hacker guyz from pilfering through your computer. Plus, you can use it to watch Canadian Netflix! Win/win.

But wait, those VPN’s that your nonsensical youtuber has recommended? It’s like fifteen bucks a month. You could get it for only five bucks a month if you drop 150 dollars right from the jump. Do you want to spend 150 dollars? Besides, Claire, your friend who got hacked, is a dumb bitch and you’re not going out like that, right? So you open up the handy dandy app store on your overly priced iPhone 15 Pro MXI and you search for ‘VPN’. What comes out of your search? A shit ton of VPN’s, that’s what. Who knew there could be so many – you thought the only ones out there was Nord because that’s what everyone on youtube recommends. But, no! There are a bunch of awesome free VPN’s right here that you can use. That’s a hell of a lot better than 15 bucks a month or even dropping almost 200 dollars on something that you can just get for free, right?

This is one of the many top rated virtual private network services that you can get on the Apple app store. It’s called X-VPN. It is #26 in Productivity, has over 370k four star ratings and from the comments, people absolutely love it. Now, in the recent past, Apple made it mandatory for app developers to tell it’s users what kind of data the app collects, if any. Let me give you the list of shit that this super popular VPN collects. There are three different categories;

  1. Data Used To Track You

    • Location
    • Usage Data
    • Diagnostics
    • Identifiers

  2. Data Linked To You

    • Location
    • Usage Data
    • Diagnostics
    • Identifiers
    • Contact Info

  3. Data Not Linked To You

    • Usage Data
    • Diagnostics

Like come on, man. That’s just horrible. But people love it! Because they have no idea that this company, based in Hong Kong too btw, is siphoning data left and right from it’s users and sending it right back to the CCP. That’s the Chinese government if you didn’t know.

It’s just crazy to me that people blindly allow these companies to do this to them. And look, I get it. I’m not perfect when it comes to my online privacy/security because there is no way to be 100% perfect. It’s just impossible.

But people can do a few things to boost their privacy/security online like using strong passwords and taking advantage of a password manager. Bitwarden is a good one. But you can easily separate your digital life by using a few different email addresses or email aliases. You could also really take a look into the services that you’re using and decide if you really need it or not. I get that you can’t get rid of every evil service. Hell, I hate Google but I use youtube because.. Well because I like youtube.

But you get what I am saying, there are simple things that you can do to make yourself just a tad bit safer while being online. For example, don’t use these fucking VPN’s! They’re horrible. Go use something like Mullvad or IVPN. Because they’re on the app store too and guess how much data they collect – none.

Stay safe and be wary of the products and services that you use. They’re not all good!