Privacy Blog

"Friends don’t let friends get spied on.' – Richard Stallman, President of the Free Software Foundation and longtime advocate of privacy in technology.

VPN (Virtual Private Networking)

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US Senators ask DHS to look into US Government Workers Using Foreign VPNs

The use of a VPN is highly recommended to reduce the odds of anyone spying on your online activities. One exception: when the VPN is owned and operated by spies. Two US senators have asked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to look into the possible dangers of US government workers using VPN apps that are owned by foreign companies and which redirect sensitive government-related traffic through servers located in […]

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Is Your VPN Secure?

According to an article by Mohammad Taha Khan And Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez in the phys.org web site: “About a quarter of internet users use a virtual private network, a software setup that creates a secure, encrypted data connection between their own computer and another one elsewhere on the internet. Many people use them to protect their privacy when using Wi-Fi hotspots, or to connect securely to workplace networks while traveling. Other […]

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Facebook Pays Cell Phone Owners to Install a Shady VPN that Spies on Them

Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access to […]

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The Easiest Way to Install a VPN

The easiest method of installing a Virtual Private Network (VPN) is not the cheapest. Then again, the prices seem reasonable for what you receive. I have been using VPNs for years on the various computers I have owned. The security and privacy of VPNs is important to me, and I believe such privacy should be important to every internet user. Who wants hackers, spies, or your local internet provider spying […]

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Why You Might Want to Give Up Your Landline Phone

Millions of people are cutting the cords of landline phone service and have switched to cellular or VoIP (internet calling) services. You might think, “That’s nice, but I like my wired landline phone. I plan to keep it forever.” I bet you will change your mind before long. You may not change it today, but I suspect you will change within a very few years. When you do, you probably […]

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WireGuard: Probably the Most Secure and Fastest VPN Available Today

WireGuard® is a VPN protocol that is rapidly becoming very popular and for good reason. It aims to be much faster as well as simpler, leaner, and more useful than OpenVPN and other protocols used by any number of VPN providers. Some VPN experts refer to WireGuard as “revolutionary.” VPNs will shield you from hackers, foreign and domestic government spies, ISPs, and everyone else who has no business recording what […]

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Alphabet’s Cybersecurity Group Touts Its New Open Source Private VPN

Alphabet (the parent company of Google, YouTube, JigSaw, and a bunch of other corporate divisions) is proudly promoting its new, FREE VPN called “Outline” and for good reasons. Unscrupulous VPN providers can steal your identity, peek in on your data, inject their own ads on non-secure pages, or analyze your browsing habits and sell that information to advertisers, says one Jigsaw official. And you can’t know for sure whether you […]

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Mozilla’s Firefox offers VPN Service to Boost Privacy for $10 a Month

According to a report by Stephen Shankland in the C|Net web site, “Mozilla is experimenting with a VPN (virtual private network) service to get a little financial wiggle room from people willing to spend some money to have their internet traffic encrypted better to thwart internet service providers and others from snooping on their online activity. Mozilla will test the offering with a portion of Firefox users in the US […]

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Facebook’s Onavo VPN is Banned from Apple’s App Store

A couple of weeks ago, I published a brief article entitled, You Should Delete Facebook’s VPN App. It provided a link to a number of articles describing Facebook’s violation of Apple’s data-gathering rules. The Facebook so-called VPN, called Onavo, did exactly the opposite of what VPNs are supposed to do: it monitored everything users were sending and receiving across the VPN and collected personal information about each VPN user, information […]

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