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by iLoveOncall 1372 days ago
If there is one group of people I will never feel bad for, it's the VPN / proxy vendors.

They've been doing false advertising for years on every channel, making consumers pay for absolutely useless products.

3 comments

There's absolutely terrible players in the space.

We're also in the space, I don't think we're selling useless products, or falsely advertising.

Our customers use our proxy servers to test applications that use your IP address to show you localized content (IP Location, GeoIP, etc). We're in 80+ countries 250+ locations globally.

Being able to switch your location with a browser plugin makes it just a few clicks, and _much_ faster than switching VPN endpoints. You also get to proxy just your browser traffic (or even just traffic against a few specific domains) rather than all the traffic on your machine. So your Spotify/Slack/Outlook connections can all run normally, and you're only proxying the site you want to test from somewhere else.

This change is terrible for us. Especially so because users flipping around between different proxies is a major use case. A user needing to re-enter their credentials for each unique proxy server is much worse than just once.

How are you planning to adapt to the change?
There are many legitimate use cases of VPN's. Also there are many VPN companies that don't do false advertising such as Windscribe, mullvad or iVPN.
> There are many legitimate use cases of VPN's

Yes of course, but that probably represents less than 10% of the customers (I'm being extremely generous on purpose, it's probably 0.1%) of your usual NordVPN and co.

> don't do false advertising such as Windscribe

"Stop tracking and browse privately" and "block annoying advertisers from stalking you online" proves you wrong. VPNs don't stop trackers.

> don't do false advertising such as Mullvad

"Evade hackers and trackers". Sure.

> don't do false advertising such as iVPN

Hey looks good actually, they indeed don't claim to block trackers or anything else, just change your IP / geolocation.

> Yes of course, but that probably represents less than 10% of the customers.

Lol how did you come up with 10%? Did you just make it up?

> VPNs don't stop trackers.

Windscribe (and other VPN's) can block trackers. https://blog.windscribe.com/how-r-o-b-e-r-t-works-76d6274460...

A huge portion of VPN users do it to get around geo-blocking, which has not been falsely advertised.
> Hey looks good actually, they indeed don't claim to block trackers or anything else, just change your IP / geolocation

Add FoxyProxy to that list of no false advertising, please

VPNs are quite useful in the UK. A fair number of sites are blocked by ISPs for various reasons.
I'm in the UK, almost all the blocked sites are unblocked just by changing DNS servers. No need to give all your data to a ~middleman~ man in the middle for that.