Am I correcting thinking this article is talking about the webpages of the associated VPN services? They're not injecting these trackers into the responses to HTTP requests sent over port 80 or anything like that?
If that's the case, then this doesn't seem to be a huge issue and I found the title of the submission to be somewhat misleading in this regard - my first thought was that these VPN providers were tracking/logging the traffic that passed through their servers as part of their service.
I also don't see a huge issue with the fact that some VPN providers give users a choice of different protocols which vary in security. This choice may be of use to users who are concerned about compatibility and perhaps are unable to use OpenVPN. When you connect to Google using TLS, there are many ciphers that are supported - some more secure than others.
That's not what's being suggested in this article, nobody is injecting beacons into traffic that passes through a VPN server, however most providers are advertising themselves as more than just a pipe that you funnel your data through, which gives you a different IP on the other end. They market themselves as complete solutions to being private and anonymous online by using words like "total privacy", "complete privacy", "fully protected" when promoting their products. You being a more tech savvy users knows that this is not the case, however a less knowledgeable person will mistake these services for what they claim to be, which they are not. They make these claims, while exposing their own users to the same trackers they claim to protect against.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadIf that's the case, then this doesn't seem to be a huge issue and I found the title of the submission to be somewhat misleading in this regard - my first thought was that these VPN providers were tracking/logging the traffic that passed through their servers as part of their service.
I also don't see a huge issue with the fact that some VPN providers give users a choice of different protocols which vary in security. This choice may be of use to users who are concerned about compatibility and perhaps are unable to use OpenVPN. When you connect to Google using TLS, there are many ciphers that are supported - some more secure than others.