Dark Side of Free VPNs | How Data Logging Works?!

Seven VPN services sold on a no logs promise left a database open on the internet, and inside were over a billion entries, browsing histories and passwords in plain text. One of them had a policy saying it tracked none of it. So we follow the traffic outward, and find out who ends up holding the record. This is what a VPN actually does, stated narrowly, and what happens at the far end of the tunnel where the encryption stops. We go through the UK NCSC's definition of the job, the EFF's line that everything hidden from your ISP is visible to the provider, and the fact that the FTC published four checks for choosing a VPN app in 2018 and then wrote a 2023 public Wi-Fi guide that never mentions VPNs once. Then the receipts: the 1.2 terabyte Dreamfii white-label exposure of July 2020 with 1,083,997,361 entries; the 2017 CDT complaint against Hotspot Shield; the $20-per-gigabyte residential proxy business that free Hola users were unknowingly supplying; two academic audits of Android VPN apps ten years apart that both found the tunnel leaking; and the ownership audit that found 20 of the 100 most-downloaded free iOS VPNs traced back to mainland China or Hong Kong with none of them disclosing it. The payoff is not a product recommendation. It is a rule for deciding when a VPN is worth switching on at all, taken from what the institutions have already written down. CHAPTERS 00:00 WHAT THE TUNNEL MOVES 03:10 THE REGULATOR CHANGED ITS ANSWER 06:25 WHAT A LOG IS MADE OF 09:05 THE DATABASE LEFT OPEN 13:40 WHO PAYS FOR FREE 17:30 THE COMPANY YOU CANNOT NAME If this is the kind of thing you want explained properly, subscribe. If I got a detail wrong, tell me in the comments. I read them, and I would rather fix it than defend it. REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) - UK National Cyber Security Centre https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/mobile-... Choosing a VPN That's Right for You - EFF Surveillance Self-Defense https://ssd.eff.org/module/choosing-vpn-th... In the market for a VPN app? - FTC Business Blog, Andrea Arias, 22 February 2018 https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog... Are Public Wi-Fi Networks Safe? What You Need To Know - FTC Consumer Advice, February 2023 https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/are-publ... Seven 'no log' VPN providers accused of leaking 1.2TB of user logs - The Register, Shaun Nichols, 17 July 2020 https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo... 'Free' VPN Hola is LITERALLY flogging access to users' devices - The Register, Alexander J Martin, 29 May 2015 https://www.theregister.com/2015/05/29/hol... MVPNalyzer: An Investigative Framework for Auditing the Security and Privacy of Mobile VPNs - NDSS 2026 https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/... Apple Offers Apps With Ties to Chinese Military - Tech Transparency Project, 1 April 2025 https://www.techtransparencyproject.org/ar...