It’s bad enough when various web sites collect your personal data and then resell it. However, it is despicable when apps do the same thing and probably doubly despicable when an app that reportedly secures your privacy instead violates it without telling you what it is doing. The folks at The Best VPN performed an audit into the permissions asked by 81 Android VPN apps available in the Google Play Store. What they found is unsettling: several readily available VPN apps may be accessing more data than they should be.
The results? You never want to use Yoga VPN or oVPNSpider as they had the highest number of unnecessary permissions, including highly sensitive information like specific location data, access to your phone’s status, and read/write permissions for both internal and external storage. oVPNSpider even asks for access to read your log files, which The Best VPN notes was previously disabled for third-party app due to the high level of security risks associated with access to such files.
Other Android VPNs deemed unsafe by The Best VPN’s testing include:
Yoga VPN
oVPNSpider
Dash VPN
Hola
ProxPN
Seed 4 Me
SwitchVPN
Zoog VPN
As always, the free VPN apps should never be trusted.
You can read the details in an article by Brendan Hesse in the LifeHacker web site at: http://bit.ly/2J0ElaS.
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Categories: Online Privacy & Security, VPN (Virtual Private Networking)
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