With more people working from home due to the novel 'COVID-19' coronavirus pandemic, the internet has become more crowded than ever.
As VPN providers report a sudden increase in people using their services due the pandemic, it's concerning to find that even top VPNs are tracking and recording their users activities.
What this means, those VPN services are potentially leaking their data, according to a research by comparison website VPNPro.
Here, VPNpro analyzed 114 VPNs and found that out of that many, 102 have websites with trackers on them and 26 of those websites have 10 or more trackers.
Many of the trackers are developed by third-party companies with reputations for not respecting user privacy.
Using freeware anti-tracker add-on Ghostery, VPNPro identified 34 different trackers that are bad for privacy.
On a blog post, VPNPro wrote that:
"So it would come as a huge surprise for those users to find out that some of their favorite VPNs don’t seem to respect their users’ privacy at all."
While trackers alone are already bad, some of those VPN websites also deploy session-replay scripts, which simply record every user action on their website.
VPNPro found that 26 VPN websites use session-replay scripts on their sites, with one, Avast SecureLine VPN, excessively abuse 3 different session-replay tools to record users.
Fortunately for users, the situation isn’t all bad.
First of all, there are many different types of trackers and they offer different levels of privacy.
Most trackers are meant to collect user data, and will not share anything beyond anonymous/aggregate data. Some are even transparent in what the do and collect, explaining about what they share, and why they are needed for a website to function.
Others however, are rather unclear about what they share. but their number doesn't exceed 'legitimate' ones.
And second, VPNPro found 13 websites that have absolutely no trackers on them, and 48 websites have 4 or fewer trackers on them.
But still, the fact isn't promising because people visit VPN websites because they expect privacy. Essentially, people expect higher level of anonymity when using these services.
As a workaround to combat these trackers and session-replay scripts, VPNPro advises users to:
- Use extensions and tools to block many of the trackers and session-replay scripts.
- Use privacy-by-default browsers.
- Seriously limit what people share on these websites, or avoid them completely. Rather than browsing their sites, simply send them an email for inquiry, support or questions.