 So let's talk real quick today about VPNs. Specifically, Inker Free VPN and what's going on with them. Now, this has always been one of my suspicions. A lot of people always want to go, I've seen a VPN so I can hide my IP address and protect all my things. And I've always thought if someone really wanted to, the people who really want to use VPN are the ones who maybe want to hide something. So if someone wanted to start a service as a VPN that also made money by collecting all the data, those two things might make sense. Now I can't say that any other companies are aware of doing this, but these guys got caught doing exactly that. And this is one of the reasons that VPN offers to me, even the paid ones, a limited amount of protection because you don't know if that company's been compromised. Now I've reviewed PIA and they seem to have taken a really strong stance on things in the past, which is great, but still, if someone monitors at their head end, they know everything about you because you're logging in. Now they've done a good job of disconnecting you and that as in PIA has disconnecting you from the way the payments done because they take so many different ways you can pay them that way you can kind of try to keep it anonymous. But still, they're gonna know your IP address. That's something all the VPN companies know and that is a personal identity on a file of one. Unless you jump from VPN then to another VPN, then another VPN and complicate things. At that point just use Tor. It'll be a lot better. So the internet was not really designed to be anonymous. We'll just throw that out there. So that's why it's so difficult to make yourself unknown on the internet. But back to what we're here to talk about, which is Anchor Free. Now anytime something's free, you're the product. Simple as that. They're selling your, whatever they're collecting, probably all your data and information. Well it turns out Anchor Free is in trouble with the Federal Payee Commission because it looks like they were doing exactly that. So let's jump into this. So we found this article over on Ars Technia and it's really caught my eye here. So FTC must scrutinize hotspot shield over alleged traffic interception groups as. So I'll jump right to some of the highlights. Hotspot shield was doing traffic redirection of Anchor Free's VPN. So they were redirecting to their own commerce traffic to partnering domains. So they would re-inject some of the ads. They were able to actually prove this. I think they worked with Carnegie Mellon to reverse engineer the app and did a bunch of comparisons on there. Then there's the complaint itself. Now where the complaint comes in with the Federal Trade Commission is because if a company says they do one thing but does another, that's where the problem comes in. So they are making these claims, stay private on Amazon Online, anyone tracking your IP address, identity, location from websites online tracking, enjoy your complete anonymity. No logs kept hotpot shield does not track or keep any logs of its users and their activities. You are completely private on hotspot shield. This is something I think is funny. So if you go to anchorfree.com slash advertise reach 35 million active and engaged unique users from around the world. They literally from their main page to this is their sales page, view our service platform, user affinity, 190 countries. They literally have it advertised in here that they're kind of doing this. I mean, this is enough to raise suspicion. Like I said, if it's free, where do they make money running a VPN service? Easy, they give it to you for free and then they're offering right here, selling it on here. So where the real conflict comes in is the fact that they're not clear that they're selling it. They have this front page of secure private unrestricted world information, you know, hotspot shield free download and they're probably right now, this is, you know, live and this is, they're actively engaged back and forth. And so far, according to Ars Technia, as of August 2nd, they has still not addressed. They gave some real generic answers apparently to the FTC complaint, but still haven't really, you know, really responded accurately. And they probably won't until this goes to court. They're hiding behind lawyers and everything else. But it's, you know, just trying to get the word out there that some of these VPNs are not quite what they say. So they, on here, secure all online activities, hide your IP address, identity location, trackers. And at the same time, they're selling your information. So you can't have it both ways. And that's really the crux of this. That's where the problem becomes is you can't just keep saying, I'm going to hide and keep you safe. All's you're saying is, I'm gonna keep you out of the normal ad network and we're going to put you into our ad network. That's how they should advertise this. You'll get different ads by us. So you'll be safe from the ads by other people. But it goes a little bit deeper. When he reverse engineered the app, apparently the app was looking at a little, but a little bit more detailed than you actually were giving up before. So they were using a couple of identifiers, including SSID identifiers, and that's for your Wi-Fi. So when you loaded this, it was actually going in and looking up your Wi-Fi that you were attached to. That goes a step further to look in your phone and look at that than you were before, before you were using a VPN. So they've actually now gone a step further. Identifier cookies for Facebook. Identifier, Mac through party. This was also the Wi-Fi state and read phone state and internet. So they pulled, and this is all from reverse engineering from the Carnegie Mellon. They were looking at all the different things that this app pulls from your phone when you load it on there. And this is specifically for the phone app, but there's same things doing, this is what the system does. They're pulling a lot of data off your computer or your phone. So they're not really as much of a VPN as you think. I mean, they're also doing a switching you to their own ad network, it looks like. But anytime something's free, you gotta be suspicious. Cause the reality is, not everyone just wants to run a business out of the kinds that are hard and funded. Somehow this has to get funded. They either fund it by asking you for money or they fund it by selling all your data. And right here on their website, anchor free slash advertise. Here is the tier sheet for all the different specs of why you should be advertising. For more information about the service, contact us. This is all about their advertising service. That's fine, if that's how the companies make money, it's Facebook's up front about it. They take your data that you put on Facebook and then they sell ads on Facebook and as a business owner that advertises on Facebook, this works, this is a fine system. Maybe people don't think about them being the product or their information, but they are. But in a VPN, when you're talking about security and trying to say, I'm keeping all your stuff anonymous, but you're actually pulling more data than I was giving up before I loaded your tool. You can kind of see how this is a false advertising type of thing. But just wanted to raise some awareness of this and throw it out there, anchor free, probably not a good idea to use it, but if you decide you want to use it, because you like their ad network better than whatever ad network you're getting now, go ahead. So that's just my thoughts on that. I'll keep an eye on the stories. I'm kind of curious how this is going to pan out. So it's a little bit, kind of an interesting thing. All right, if you like to count in here, like and subscribe, thanks.