SahwaPrivacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN"
NuXCOM_90PercentFrom what I can tell… that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don’t care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub…).
I dunno. I’ve been in far too many Internet Arguments ™ with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt’s ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says “John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark”.
And while I wouldn’t trust microsoft at all for… anything? Do y’all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren’t collecting your data?
“I need a vpn”
Why?
“Privacy”
You trust SuperNeatVPN headquartered in $unregulatedCountry more than your own ISP?
“I run a VPN because Joe Rogan says I need to in order to be secure”
Man, do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is when people run VPNs on their BYOD or work device (hey I don’t manage it, I’m just the MSP), have an established history of popping up all around the world, and then eagerly click the phishing links?
Heh.
Our IT department is so incompetent that… let’s just say I have made it a point to leave a paper trail in my inbox of me highlighting issues and complaining because I can’t rule out a full investigation.
Last year we had a “technical all hands” which basically means IT have fucked up to the point that engineering/platform are now responsible for untangling the mess from first principles. And we actually were allowed to look at the logs and were seeing “attacks” from all over Western Europe. I suspect IT would still be trying to call the FBI for help if one of our PSEs hadn’t sighed and said “how much of our staff are running VPNs?”. And then we had to explain what those are… to the people who actually manage the VPN we use to remote in.
STILL not sure if I am more horrified that they didn’t understand that VPNs exist or that they had just not noticed that much mystery traffic until that day.