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 🌻

  • azalty
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    8 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.

    • Bahnd Rollard@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      That is the tricky part. If you run a public VPN and a governement comes to you and says “give us all you have on user X were investigating them” you sorta have to comply and you cant go telling people that you did that either.

      A few of these services will have a line on their website along the lines of “we have never provided data to any governemnt” and when they get told to cough it up they remove the line. Protons data canary has been dead for a long time, and Im not sure if other VPNs even bothered to add something like that.

      As for the price tag, I’m paying exactly for that privacy (and also their mail service, de-googling yourself is hard). If I needed a less private VPN I would host one myself.

      • azalty
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        8 months ago

        Not all countries will comply, and not all will require you to stay silent