Essentially, these tools can record all your activities when you visit their websites, including what you clicked on, what you searched for, what you entered into any forms (before you’ve even clicked on ‘submit’), and anything else you’re doing online.Īnd by record, we mean actually record: these session-replays are video recordings of your online behavior.
The term “session-replay” comes from the ability for these tools to replay user sessions. We found that 26 VPN websites use session-replay scripts on their sites, with one, Avast SecureLine VPN, even using 3 different session-replay tools to record users. Session replay scripts allow website owners, marketers, sales people, and more, to see how users are interacting with their websites. Whenever you visit a website that uses session-replay scripts, you’re probably having your session – your visit – being recorded. The list of VPN websites we analyzed comes from our VPNpro rankings for 2019. The original list contained the top 120 VPN websites, but 6 VPN websites have since gone offline.
It not only has a large list of trackers in its database, but it also conveniently provides links to these trackers’ privacy policies and various summaries of the data that’s collected and shared.īesides looking at simply the trackers for each VPN website, we also looked through these third-party privacy policies to determine their safety or risk. In order to analyze these websites, we used the freeware anti-tracker add-on Ghostery. Only 13 websites have 0 trackers on them.45 websites have Facebook trackers, with 39 having more than 1.17 websites have trackers from third parties whose privacy practices are not sufficiently clear.There are 32 session replay scripts across the 114 VPN websites.102 VPN websites have 1 or more trackers, and 26 websites have 10 or more trackers.Having even 1 of them on your website really defeats any argument for ultimate privacy and anonymity. Remember, these trackers are made so that they can track your online behavior, and follow you wherever you go on the internet. Luckily, the situation isn’t all bad: there are 13 websites that have absolutely no trackers on them, and 48 websites have 4 or fewer trackers on them.īut, honestly, that last accolade is simply a pat on the back. A lot of these trackers involve third parties that don’t have the best reputation for respecting user privacy, which can be detrimental for the user.Įven worse, they’re using session replay scripts: nearly 1 in 4 VPN websites used them to record video of how each user goes around their website, what they click, what they search for, and much more. Of the 114 VPNs we analyzed, 102 websites had trackers on them, with 26 websites having 10 or more trackers. Our research shows that VPN websites are disappointingly very similar to – and sometimes worse than – other popular websites. So it would come as a huge surprise for those users to find out that some of their favorite VPNs don’t seem to respect their users’ privacy at all. Of the two, VPNs are used for their ability to get around geolocation restrictions, as well as to provide users with the utmost in security and privacy. When you think about the most consumer-friendly cybersecurity tools, it’ll probably come down to antivirus programs and VPNs.
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