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A free VPN is not a gift, okay? If you're using a free VPN, you're not the customer, you're the product. A VPN company rents real servers in real data centers in a dozen different countries and pays for every single gig of data that moves through those data centers. That's expensive. So when an app hands you all of that for $0, it's not generosity. It's a business model you weren't aware of. People shop for VPNs, they're looking at stuff like, is it encrypted? Is it garbage? But what I think you should really be asking is who runs the other end of that tunnel and how do they get paid? So how do VPNs get paid? There are a few options that all play out in the real world. Option one is that they log you, your DNS queries, every site you visit, how long you stayed at that website, all that stuff. And there's a study out there surrounding free VPN apps and it found that 71% of them are handing your personal data to outside companies. 71% is not a couple of bad apples, that's like a category of us. Three-fourths of all VPN providers give your data away. If they're not making their money that way, option two is much worse. Some free VPN providers don't sell you, they sell your machine. They use every free user's machine as an exit node for other people's traffic and then resold that access commercially. So somebody else's activity is leaving the internet from your IP address at your house, on your dime. This is not hypothetical. Somebody actually bought a pile of those IP addresses and used them to attack other websites. When it all came to light, the company's fix was to update their terms of service. They didn't even fix the business model, they just changed their terms of service and everybody was okay. You know, you have a contract with them. They are regulated, and you know exactly who they are. But a free VPN app is an unregulated stranger with significantly more access than your ISP has. And you didn't remove the observer at all. You just traded down to a much skummier one. What you actually should do about your VPN is pay for a VPN, or better than that, build your own. If you want to build your own, I already made a video on how to do that. It's right here. It runs on hardware you probably already have sitting around. Share this video with your friends who think that free VPN app is really cool. And then check what phone you have company that runs it. Get rid of it. If you can't name the company that runs it, get rid of it. I understand that your internet service provider watching you is bad, but you have a contract with them. They are regulated, and you know exactly who they are. But a free VPN app is an unregulated stranger with significantly more access than your ISP has. And you didn't remove the observer at all. You just traded down to a much skummier one. What you actually should do about your VPN is pay for a VPN, or better than that, build your own. If you want to build your own, I already made a video on how to do that. It's right here. It runs on hardware you probably already have sitting around. Share this video with your friends who think that free VPN app is really cool. And then check what phone you have company that runs it. Get rid of it.