Cybersecurity review site that publishes VPN and antivirus reviews, data breach reports, and app research.
HN commenters are skeptical: they point to its commercial agreements with providers and affiliate-style incentives, though one cites its app storage research.
Exactly. A lot of people think this is hypocrisy but this is exactly what you want Facebook doing.
It seems like a week doesn't pass that there isn't news of yet another scraping/dark-adtech firm exposing hundreds of millions of these types of records[0]
If you think Facebook are bad, these companies are an order of magnitude more evil, and you're never going to hold any of them accountable because they don't care for regulations.
edit: The threat model here is really concerning. To build user databases legitimately takes a lot of effort and funding. To do it via extensions and scraping requires finding browser extensions that have a lot of users and loose permissions (usually https://*/\*) and acquiring them for cheap, pushing an update and then just watching the data roll in.
The only recourse is further lockdown of browser extension capabilities (which also punishes good apps like uBlock Origin), purging extension stores (which also usually traps innocent players) and/or taking legal action as Facebook are doing
[0] https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/socialarks-leak-report/
As already mentioned this is highly dependent on why you want a VPN and what's most important to you. That being said, an internet hero by the name of ThatOnePrivacyGuy researched and scrutinized a significant number of available VPNs using numerous data points and compiled them all into a spreadsheet for easy comparison.
The original site is now defunct [0], but has been merged with SafetyDetectives, and so now the full comparison can be found here [1].
Without any other details, that is your best place to start looking.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/user/ThatOnePrivacyGuy/comments/jmuty2/that_one_privacy_site_merges_with_safetydetectives/
[1] https://www.safetydetectives.com/best-vpns/
Edit: adjusted formatting
On Android vs iOS, it's worth noting Android apps are smaller than iOS apps. The details are complicated but this report says after installation Android apps take up about half the space as iOS. https://www.safetydetectives.com/blog/app-storage-usage-research/
One specific complication: Apple's store reports install size, Google Play reports compressed download size. https://www.emergetools.com/blog/posts/are-android-apps-really-that-much-smaller-than-ios
don't know the source or quality/people building it, but i did use [0] (get the detailed table and change to "all") when picking a VPN to roll with.
After i had already found OVPN i was amazed that they had the option to just anonymously mail them cash.
[0]: https://www.safetydetectives.com/best-vpns/#detailed
To me this sounds like they couldn't get juicy deals and a referral program like they do for all the other fishy AVs
I mean.. take a look at their home page: https://www.safetydetectives.com/
https://www.safetydetectives.com/disclosure/
"This list also takes into account user satisfaction post-purchase and our commercial agreements with service providers."