It's a reminder that VPNs have their own risks, beyond technical ones if operated incompetently -- namely, that you have to trust the VPN company itself.
UPDATED to reflect which users were being spied on.
@tinfoilhat@metin@dangillmor judging by their antics around Brexit, various elections etc… Facebook is the bigger data risk. Unless you can point to any elections TikTok has interfered in…
@tinfoilhat@metin@dangillmor for most people in the west, and especially in the US, Facebook is a far greater data risk, simply based on their past actions.
@kgoldsholl@dangillmor ... and when I talked about TikTok and I pointed out all of these companies are evil, someone argued with me that Meta had to comply with US and EU law. Not sure what rock that person's been living under, but Meta doesn't give a shit about the law unless they're caught.
People just need to be pissed off enough about what Zuck does that the benefits of leaving (FINALLY) outweigh the benefits of staying.
Long before Facebook was a thing, we had effective, robust ways of communicating with others. Those choices, including actually private ones, have only increased.
Family, friends, businesses… ALL can find alternatives to Facebook. Pretty easily.
@dangillmor I still cannot find the technical details how Onavo was supposed to get the cleartext of TLS traffic on supposedly secure iOS/Android devices?
They must have used some trick to install a fake CA onto the devices, and that's my friends, not exactly VPN-functionality.
@dangillmor I've seen quite a lot of claims floated about VPNs. My favorite being that supposedly they'll protect people from viruses. VPNs do precisely diddly squat for viruses. There is a handful of things VPNs are good for and I think most people don't even understand what they are.
@dangillmor The only thing a VPN is guaranteed to do is funnel all your traffic to the VPN operator. Nothing else. I've never used one for privacy purposes
@dangillmor Exactly what i always say. VPN is not a security measure, because you need to fully trust the VPN company. In that respect it can even be introducing a new vulnerability. Only when you own the VPN server, it can be a security measure.
@dangillmor
About time that one of these "you are the product" data selling tech cos. adopts the mission statement: "Be evil," rather than advertising just the opposite.
No panacea but I wld like to see a C-suite level Office of #ChiefEthicist in all of these companies (and in many more, as well) — to function independently, much like USG's Inspector General offices. It could help if developed wisely (lots of details to work out.)
@dangillmor it’s not that I didn’t warn about this for years. The VPN is only as safe as your trust in the VPN operator — and it creates an absolute single point of failure.
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