The Apple and Google app stores continue to offer private browsing apps that are surreptitiously owned by Chinese companies, more than six weeks after they were identified in a Tech Transparency Project report. Apple and Google may also be profiting from these apps, which put Americans’ privacy and U.S. national security at risk, TTP found.
The apps are virtual private networks (VPNs), which promise to mask a user’s identity as they browse the internet. But Chinese-owned VPNs raise serious privacy and security concerns for Americans because Chinese companies can be forced to share user data with the Chinese government under the country’s national security laws. VPNs have access to particularly sensitive user data since they see all of a person’s web activity.
How are the Chinese data hoarders providing government your information to the government any worse than the US ones doing the same? VPNs are only a small part of the full arsenal needed for obfuscating your identity, and the nationality of any of them is irrelevant, as pretty much all governments are gathering data from them.
I don’t trust Chinese VPNs, and I don’t trust American VPNs, or Russian, or Israeli. I feel somewhat safer with Mullvad or Proton VPNs, and even then, they are worthless if you’re relying only on VPNs.