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.
Comment on How come TurboVPN can have double the amount of downloads compared to NordVPN and ExpresVPN? ++
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
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.
Grangle1@lemm.ee 5 months ago
Sunny@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
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.
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
As I said, only very few people cares about their privacy, so it’s not really that shocking. I even 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.
Sunny@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
I believe this to be the case indeed
Rooki@lemmy.world 5 months ago
and Nordvpn or Expressvpn isnt even private so… its paid but you still give all your data to them.
thirteene@lemmy.world 5 months ago
As much as I detest nordvpn they do have a 0 logs policy that has been validated. Don’t give them money under any circumstance, but this isn’t accurate.
TheFriar@lemm.ee 5 months ago
What did nordvpn do that makes you hate them?
thirteene@lemmy.world 5 months ago
my.nordaccount.com/legal/terms-of-service/ It’s only two pages you should at least skim over the absolutely no guarantees, no refunds past 30 days, no refunds without needing support to “diagnose” your issue first.
Tickets are 3 day wait times, most of the updates are “do you know your account number” despite being in the ticket. The branded application is insanely unstable, since using ovpn client it’s been somewhat stable but the android client causes problems with Bluetooth on my pixel. They built in multiple layers of kill switch automation INTO the product, they can’t seem to figure out static ips. Honestly they are just incompetent.
Rooki@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I doubt that really but if you trust them good.
thirteene@lemmy.world 5 months ago
prnewswire.com/…/nordvpn-verifies-its-no-logs-cla… cnet.com/…/nordvpn-passes-third-independent-no-lo…
That will likely change with any pressure though.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’d like to see them find out why a server crashes if that is true. If someone actually cares and knows enough I think an admin or someone from the government could determine a lot of most browsing data and link it with users just through the DNS cache and time. I’m also very sure they have some kinds of logs, even if they don’t log what each user is doing.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
Bahnd@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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)
azalty@jlai.lu 5 months ago
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.
Ziglin@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 5 months ago
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.