VPN brand deals are lying to you

this video is sponsored by expressvpn today's sponsor private internet access and i'm here to tell you about today's sponsor expressvpn sponsored by cyberghost vpn thanks to find folks at nordvpn but first a word about our sponsor expressvpn thank you to expressvpn for sponsoring this video let's talk about them for a quick set if i had a dollar for every vpn brand deal that i've seen i could probably buy a lifetime subscription to one of those services but i wouldn't [Music] hello world noah here today we're going to be talking about vpn brand deals now if you've been on youtube lately you've probably seen pretty much every single creator promoting some sort of vpn vpn brand deals have gotten even more common recently because more and more people are staying at home and spending more time on the internet and so i guess these vpn companies are getting more and more customers and spending more and more money trying to get even more customers these vpn ads make bold claims like they'll single-handedly protect you from hackers or they'll let you watch any show on netflix even if it's not available in your country these vpn ads can be misleading at best and downright false at worst and so in this video we're going to take a look at what a vpn is what it does and then we're going to tackle three claims first that vpns will protect you from hackers second that they'll let you watch content that's not available in your country on a streaming service like netflix and third the claim that these vpns don't store any logs or track any data now before we go on i want to make two things very clear first of all i'm a fan of all of the channels that i showed in the beginning segment of this video and i mean no ill will towards them by using them as examples see when you get a brand deal like this the company is going to send you a script and you're just going to read the script and of course they're going to send the same script to everyone so if you go on youtube and see everyone saying the same thing why wouldn't you say the same thing now the majority of these channels are not tech channels and so i don't fault them for not doing the research and knowing exactly what they're getting themselves into especially considering how hard these vpn companies push the messages that they push second the purpose of this video is not to say that vpns are bad or that there's never a good reason to use one there are sometimes good reasons to use a vpn and we'll discuss these later on in the video the point of this video is just to say that a lot of the claims that the vpn companies make are misleading and that even though these vpn companies are telling you that you need their service perhaps you don't and with that let's get started by talking about what exactly a vpn is vpn stands for virtual private network and its intended use is to allow your computer to connect to an external network let's say a home school or work network and then have your computer act as if it's physically connected to that network so for example the computer science department at my university has some linux machines that we can remote access to run our code on but in order to access these machines you have to be connected to the university's wi-fi so if i'm not on campus i can use the university's vpn to access their network and then i can access these servers as if i were physically on campus and connected to the wi-fi these vpn companies that you see in the ads use the vpn protocol but for a different reason they basically just use it as a proxy so all of your web traffic goes through a vpn server instead of connecting directly to all of the websites that you're trying to access so without a vpn let's say that i want to go on the internet i can open up my browser and go to youtube.com for example my web browser will go through a bunch of hoops in order to do some sort of complicated things that i'm not going to get into but eventually it will establish a connection to one of the youtube web servers it will send a request saying what the user is trying to get as well as some other important information then the youtube server can do its magic to figure out how to fulfill that request and then it'll send back a response giving the data that the user requested then the connection is closed and you're good to go until you try to go to another page and make another request now with a vpn all of this is routed through to a vpn server so when you try to go to youtube.com connected to a vpn your request is sent to the vpn server then the vpn server will handle making the request to the youtube server and getting the response back and then the response is just forwarded back to you through the secure vpn tunnel that's a super basic and reductionist overview of networking and vpns but it should give you a good idea as to how things work for the purposes of this video so now let's take a look at the first claim that all of these vpn brand deals make that vpns will protect you from hackers now a lot of these vpn ads will claim that you should always use a vpn when you're connected to a public wi-fi network like the one that you'd find at a coffee shop or else hackers will be able to steal your personal information credit cards passwords and so on and so forth and while this used to be true or at least more true than it is now this is largely false these days you've probably seen a little padlock icon in your browser when you visit most websites this padlock signifies that you're using a secure connection to the website this means that all the data that you send to the server and that the server sends back to you is encrypted as far as we know today the security that's used on the web is computationally infeasible to break basically what that means is that hackers don't have a better way to break the security than to just brute force and try every single possible key to decrypt your data and there are so many possible keys to try that it would essentially take forever to try them all what this means is that as long as you see a padlock icon on every website that you connect to even if a hacker is able to launch a man-in-the-middle attack and basically intercept all of the traffic that you're sending to web servers and the web servers are sending back to you all they'll see is a bunch of gibberish in order to see what this looks like we can simulate what a hacker would see if they try to listen in on your web traffic okay so here on the left i have a completely stock instance of firefox and then here on the right i have wireshark which is a widely used network analyzer it will basically let us analyze all of the traffic on my wi-fi network and so first let's go ahead and access an unsecured website one good example is the mit home page so i just added a filter to make the results easier to understand this is my ip address on my network this is the mit web server address let me go ahead and start recording and we're going to go to mit.edu and as you can see a whole bunch of packets come through and this one's probably the most interesting one that we're going to take a look at basically you can see that there was a packet from this source which you can easily figure out is the mit web server and then the destination is just you know my computer the protocol is http which is unsecured and as you can see this is an http response it has some html in it and in fact if i go down here to take a look at this i can see right here the entire contents of the response and so if a hacker is able to intercept traffic to an unsecured website they will indeed be able to see everything that you're sending to that website and everything that that website is sending back to you which is definitely not good now let's go ahead and try a secure website i'm going to go with youtube and this is one of the many web server ip addresses for youtube seems to be the one that my computer is using right now so let's connect we're going to youtube.com and as you can see a whole bunch of data comes through once again you can tell that the source is youtube if you just google this ip address um or you know look it up you'll be able to tell but now you'll see the protocol is tls which is transport layer security that means that it's secure and now if we take a look at the data that we're getting it's just complete gibberish so whereas before we could see the full response now all we see is the encrypted data which is really not of any use to a hacker so finally i've gone ahead and connected to the vpn server for my university and now you'll see that even though i'm using the same filter with the same uh youtube ip address refreshing youtube does not cause more packets to show up and in order to demonstrate this i'm going to delete some of these filters and just have the filter for my local ip address so i have to hide the ip address of my university's vpn but now there's only one server that i'm connected to which is the vpn server and so now even my unencrypted data will be encrypted and as far as a hacker is concerned i'm just connecting to the same server over and over again so they can't even figure out what websites i'm connecting to so as you can see when you browse an unencrypted website the vpn does indeed encrypt your traffic however when you're browsing a website that's already encrypted the only added benefit that a vpn has is that it will hide the domain that you're visiting this is definitely a benefit because anyone snooping on your traffic won't even know what websites you're visiting but as far as the claim about stealing credit card data and passwords and all that it's not going to happen on an encrypted website and you'll find that any trustworthy website is secured so this security claim is what actually prompted me to make this whole video the other claims are not quite as egregious as this one but this really annoys me because basically these vpn companies are using fear in order to sell you a product that you really don't need so now let's take a look at the second point so one of the big benefits of vpns that has been promoted a lot lately is the fact that you can use a vpn to fake your location and access content on streaming services that's not available in the location that you're currently located in so for example if there's a show on netflix that's not available in the us but that is available in canada you can connect to a vpn server that's located in canada and access all of these shows now this is absolutely true when you use a vpn you're tunneling all of your web traffic through a server so whatever country the vpn server is located in is where the request will come from so even if you're located in the united states when you make a request to netflix it goes through a vpn server that's in canada and then when netflix gets the request the request is coming from a canadian vpn server and thus netflix will think that you're in canada now while this is absolutely true and it is a solid benefit of a vpn service you should know that it violates the terms of service of pretty much every single streaming service out there to give the example of everyone's favorite streaming service the netflix terms of service says you may view netflix content primarily within the country in which you have established your account and only in geographic locations where we offer our service and have licensed such content you agree not to circumvent remove alter deactivate degrade or thwart any of the content protections in the netflix service and you can find similar language in the terms of service for hulu amazon prime video hbo max and pretty much any other streaming service that you can think of basically what this means is that if you access netflix while you're physically located in the united states you are only allowed to access content that is available in the united states accessing content that is not available in the united states is a violation of the terms of service and netflix has every right to terminate your account it would be very easy for these services to detect vpn users if they wanted to one method would be to compile a list of the ip addresses of all of the most popular vpn services and then flag any accounts that make requests from these vpn servers another approach would be to look for where the requests are coming from for each account so for example if there's an account that makes a request from the united states and then canada and then somewhere in europe and then the united states again all on the same day it's pretty clear that this person is spoofing their location and their account again could be flagged now are these streaming services actually going to go after you and terminate your account probably not i mean i guess if these vpn companies are advertising this as a feature they probably haven't had too many instances of users getting their accounts flagged however these streaming services are well within their rights to deactivate any account that is bypassing their restrictions and violating their terms of service now i'm not saying that you shouldn't use a vpn to access content that you otherwise can't access i just think that you should know the risks before you start using a vpn but of course these vpn companies aren't going to tell you something like this and finally let's move on to the last point that vpn companies don't keep any logs and don't track what you do on their services now this is probably true because a vpn company is going to claim that they don't keep logs and it turned out that they actually did they would lose all of their credibility immediately and they'd probably just be put right out of business however we really can't know this for sure when you're using a third-party service like some third-party vpn you really don't know what they're doing behind the scenes you don't know what kind of data the employees have access to you don't know what kind of logs they're keeping and you don't know what kind of tracking they're doing you don't even know if there are back doors in the system for governments or other entities to access this data and the thing is is that even if you have the technical know-how you still can't verify it because as far as you're concerned the vpn is essentially a black box you establish a connection to it and it handles everything for you but you have no way to audit it and see if it actually does what it says it does so when these vpn companies claim that they're protecting you from hackers and spying from your internet service provider you're essentially transferring your trust from the networks you connect to and the internet service providers that provide them to this vpn company because all of the data is going through the vpn tunnel so if you fully believe that your vpn company is to be trusted then i guess you're good to go but even the trustworthy vpn services can't always be trusted for example back in 2018 nordvpn had a security issue where an insecure remote access program was installed on one of their servers without their knowledge and there is the potential for data to be leaked if someone had connected to this remote access point they could have viewed the encrypted traffic of all of the users that were connected to that server at the time so in this case the data was just as safe going through nordvpn as it would have been not going through nordvpn keep in mind that you're always going to have to trust someone whether it's the network you're connected to your internet service provider or the vpn company whose vpn you're using and given that you can't really verify if any of these things are to be trusted i don't know if a vpn is necessarily more trustworthy once again to be completely clear i'm not accusing any vpn companies of lying about their security or keeping logs when they say that they don't all i'm saying is that you can't know for sure what these vpn companies are doing and there's no possible way that you can know and so at the end of the day it's about putting your trust in one entity or another so that was a deep dive into the world of vpn brand deals we discussed what vpns are and why a lot of the claims that these brand deals make are actually misleading or perhaps even false now before i end the video i know that i've said a lot of negative things about vpns but there are definitely some good reasons to use them for example if you do need to hide the domains you're connected to a vpn can help you do that the content of the pages that you connect to will be encrypted as long as you have a secure connection but as we saw in the demo before a vpn will also hide the domain names additionally being able to fake your location and access content that you otherwise can't access is important in some cases if you live somewhere with an oppressive government that restricts your access to information you can use a vpn to bypass their security measures and access this information freely and of course you can still use it to watch netflix shows available in other countries as long as netflix hopefully doesn't catch you again the point of this video was not to say that vpns are bad or that they have no use it was to talk about why these brand deals misrepresent the use of vpns i hope this video will help you to be a more informed consumer if you were considering purchasing a vpn service or if you already have perhaps you'll re-evaluate what you think i can promise that you'll never see a vpn brand deal on my channel and hopefully the vpn brand deals that you see from other creators will be more truthful in the future whether it be the vpn companies revising their scripts to be more truthful or the content creators doing a little bit more research and figuring out what exactly they're promoting and to emphasize one more time i am not putting any blame on any content creator for taking a vpn brand deal i'm sure these deals are very lucrative they're all over youtube and why would you have any reason to doubt these companies when everyone else is doing the exact same thing so i hope this video gave you a better idea of what vpns actually do and that you'll include it in your consideration when deciding whether you need a vpn service for yourself so as always subscribe if you want to see more comment below with any topics that you'd like me to cover and if you like this video hit the like button see you guys next time bye for now [Music] you

Channel: Noah Rubin

Views: 4,938

Keywords: vpn, brand, deal, security, hacker, hackers, nord, express, cyber, ghost, cyberghost, private, internet, access, pia, best, top, 2020, service, Netflix, unblock, geo, restricted, geo-restricted, secure, tunnel, Hulu, hbo, max, go, now, prime, video, amazon, virtual, network, privacy, steal, personal, data, secret, sponsor, sponsorship, affiliate, sponsored

Id: dbBWjjd463c

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020