Disclaimer: I know TurboVPN and the others mentioned are not good services to use, I’m strictly doing research. I’m not looking for VPN recommendations.
Genuinely wondering how these numbers are possible? 300M downloads and 8.35M reviews…? How?! Not even Amazon Shopping app or Disney+ have this many reviews. And surely NordVPN and Express VPN are considerable larger in both users and resources? I’ve never seen a sponsorship, not even once, from Turbo VPN. Are these numbers regional based? Is Turbo VPN more known in other regions? Is it easy to spoof these numbers?
Appreciate any comments on the matter, and have a nice day 🌻
Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 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.
Rooki@lemmy.world 6 months ago
and Nordvpn or Expressvpn isnt even private so… its paid but you still give all your data to them.
thirteene@lemmy.world 6 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.
billiam0202@lemmy.world 6 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.
Grangle1@lemm.ee 6 months ago
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.
Sunny@slrpnk.net 6 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 6 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.