Good VPNs and bad
There may be more to consumer VPNs than meets the eye…
In the 2010s, consumer VPNs began popping up, and a whole new anxiety-driven market emerged, based largely on half-truths and people’s misunderstanding of how networks work. VPN providers promised their users heightened privacy, a way to circumvent geoblocking (sites that only allowed certain content to be viewed from a particular region) and all manner of other nebulous benefits for a small monthly fee. At a time when ISPs were introducing various blocks (mostly to stop people accessing torrent sites), such services had no problem finding customers. Also, as people. grew more savvy to the dangers of using public Wi-Fi, and ‘digital nomad’ became a legitimate profession, their popularity soared.
Some of these VPN providers even had free offerings, and it’s here that we find an early example of a VPN scandal. An outfit called Hola (which still exists; it’s just a little more honest about how it operates now) offered a free browser extension that enabled users to connect to a VPN in the country of their choosing. The problem was that in order to subsidise this, users unwittingly became VPN end points. So, free users were effectively joining a peer-to-peer network in which their bandwidth was used, possibly to access dodgy material. Or at least material that other users saw fit to use a VPN to access. Hola also offered a paid-for service, Luminati, which used the same network but without enrolling users. In 2015, 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan announced that Luminati was being used, by way of the over nine million free Hola users, to perform DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks on 8chan. Luminati, claimed Brennan, was a botnet for hire.