New research from Top10VPN has captured and analyzed the network traffic of the 100 most popular free VPNs on Google’s Play Store and reviewed their source code.
The findings are rather worrying, showing that 88 percent suffer some kind of data leak (IP, DNS, WebRTC) with 17 percent affected by multiple leaks.
In addition 71 percent share personal data with third parties, including Facebook, Yandex and controversial data brokers like Kochava. 15 percent contain Bytedance tracking code, while 53 percent contain at least one function in their own source code that poses a potential risk to user privacy and requests permission to run it.
Simon Migliano of Top10VPN says:
This is the biggest piece of VPN research I have ever done but I believe there’s a pressing need for it due to the frequent surges in demand for VPN that we regularly see around the world, as governments restrict their citizens’ access to the internet.
The number of free VPN users has increased at least tenfold since I began seriously investigating the dangers of free VPNs in 2018.
The 100 most popular free Android VPNs had around 260 million total installs in 2018, today, that number exceeds 2.5 billion. Yet the research finds that more than one in ten suffers encryption failures, ranging from total exposure of internet activity to leaking details of websites visited.
Among other findings, over half of VPNs showed signs of VPN tunnel instability. Only 20 percent are observed to use the strongest hashing algorithms for encryption.
You can read more on the Top10VPN site.
Image credit: ra2studio/depositphotos
