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YouTube runs experiment addressing users with ad blocker

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Karel:
I agree about the free ones being shady. I would never use them or recommend them.
But I thought that was obvious. Apparently not...

NiHaoMike:

--- Quote from: Karel on October 22, 2023, 01:17:55 pm ---I agree about the free ones being shady. I would never use them or recommend them.
But I thought that was obvious. Apparently not...

--- End quote ---
If used as a UDP over Tor gateway, I don't see that as a problem. They never get your actual IP and there's also no payment details that would considerably simplify tracing down. You obviously don't want to give them any personal data (e.g. by logging into one of your accounts through the tunnel) but that's true of any anonymizing service.

ve7xen:

--- Quote from: PlainName on October 22, 2023, 07:05:45 am ---And yet you are happy to pronounce on other companies that you also don't know anything about.

--- End quote ---

I'm simply pointing out that (many) shady examples exist and that I think it is foolish to trust any such company by default, which is what you seem to be suggesting by saying 'name the bad ones'. You should be suspicious by default of some random company on the Internet that sells VPN services. At least your local ISP will be a known quantity; they are subject to the same data protection rights you have with any other company you do business with in your country (or possibly more, in some places where common-carrier communications have special protections), they're probably subject to some scrutiny about such matters, you have a legal agreement with them that presumably comes with some legal rights, and you likely have some practical legal recourse if they violate it.

You seem to be missing the point here. When you use one of these services, you are choosing to shovel all kinds of personal data to them willingly. If you care about privacy, you should probably think about what that company might do or want to do with access to that data. You may conclude the answer is 'less than my ISP' or 'less than my government', and that's great, just don't think that shipping your data securely to someone else is automatically going to improve your privacy or security posture, all it does is change who you are trusting with it.


--- Quote ---Perhaps you could share the names of the companies you do know about?
--- End quote ---

The highest profile scandal is probably around Kape Technologies (owners of ExpressVPN, PIA and others, including VPN 'review' sites). See plenty of reporting on them, but basically this company has connections to the UAE intelligence apparatus, previously was heavily invested in developing browser-based private data collection software and spyware, and the owner himself has a pretty shady past. For example https://gizmodo.com/you-should-probably-stop-using-expressvpn-1847739547

SuperVPN (and related companies) has a pretty serious compromise. NordVPN leaked some key back in the day that would've allowed an adversary to spin up a server impersonating them.

Folks need to decide for themselves whether they trust or don't trust these companies, based on their own situation and needs.

SiliconWizard:
You can't trust any company anyway. Certainly never use a VPN that you don't fully control if you need to fully *trust* it.
After that the question is whether you prefer a random company somewhere in the world to potentially leak your data rather than your ISP directly doing it. It's all a matter of use case and context, there is no single general answer to what people should or should not do.

Bicurico:
Interestingly I have had no ads, pop-ups or other inconviniences when using Youtube for the last days (week?).

I did not change anything in my browser or habits, all I did was to click the [X] on the pop-up windows. This showed for 2-3 days and then was gone.

I am not sure if this was just a test, if they tried to convert the easily impressable or if they got some pressure for spying without consent on installed plugins, which is illegal in the EU.

Curious to see what is going to happen next.

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