Mallory Knodel, Center for Democracy and Technology One way to demonstrate trustworthiness is by not tracking data that’s unnecessary. Ultimately, it’s important to note that VPN privacy policies are built on trust, as these companies have the capability to collect a ton of information and it’s not always obvious what they’re doing with it. Even though the priest’s name wasn’t on any of the data, his device ID was linked to him because it was in locations where he worked and lived. The outlet said it obtained commercially available location data that was anonymized but contained his phone’s device ID. Take a recent example that attracted a lot of media attention: A Catholic priest, using the hookup app Grindr, was tracked and outed as gay by The Pillar, a Catholic publication. “It’s the entry key to a whole ecosystem of tracking.” “One of the biggest points where you lose some control is when a device ID gets linked to a real identity,” Paul-Olivier Dehaye, a board member at PersonalData.io, a nonprofit focused on making data rights actionable, said. While the company’s privacy policy notes that a device ID is collected with user permission, it’s mandatory to give permission if you want to use the VPN.Īnd while technically “non-personal data,” a device ID, for example, can be matched with granular details that can be used to identify an individual and, in some cases, even reconstruct a person’s movements and behaviors. “As you have noted, users’ device IDs might be used with their consent, which is exclusively non-personal data,” Petryk said. Julia Petryk, a spokesperson for MacPaw, ClearVPN’s parent company, said the company was transparent with its tracking through a disclosure on its website and a mandatory review of its privacy policy through the app. ClearVPN also says in its privacy policy that it collects device IDs. “While we accept and understand our strategy’s criticism, millions of people would be less safe and less private without it,” Miller said in an email.ĮxpressVPN’s privacy policy discloses that it also collects device IDs to track where users learned about and signed up for its mobile app. Tyler Miller, a spokesperson for the company, said that user IDs are only collected to figure out where purchases came from (for example, if the app download came because of a specific ad) and that customers are notified when that data is collected. NordVPN, meanwhile, says it uses its customers’ user IDs and device IDs for marketing purposes. But many of their privacy policies do allow for other sorts of data collection.ĬyberGhost VPN, for example, promotes “absolute privacy on all devices” with its service, but its privacy policy notes that it can collect specific “non-personal” information on devices, including their advertising ID, battery levels, gyro-sensor data (the sensor used to automatically rotate a phone screen), and mobile service provider.ĬyberGhost didn’t respond to requests for comment. And we searched through our Citizen Browser data for VPN Facebook advertisements to see not only how VPNs are marketing themselves on Facebook but also how they’re making use of that platform’s personal-data-driven advertising machine.Īgain, none of these VPN’s say they collect any sort of logs of user activity. We also ran their websites through Blacklight, our tool for detecting third-party trackers. To get a sense of exactly what sorts of information VPNs are grabbing, The Markup examined the privacy policies of 14 popular VPN companies. “A VPN helps secure and helps privatize some of what I do on the web.”īut while VPNs say they do not log people’s activity-meaning their browsing, who they call, which TV shows they watch-that does not mean they’re not siphoning data from their users and even their prospective customers. “Especially because I’m a content creator, it’s so important to me to uphold my own security and privacy standards,” she said. Morse said she uses VPNs like ProtonVPN to help keep her online activities private because of her public persona. Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things.
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