This is why you should never use a free VPN #tech #privacy #security
The short version: A 'free' VPN's 360-million-record leak is a reminder that privacy tools run by someone else can become surveillance tools themselves if nobody's watching the watchers.
Our Take
Credit to Mading Thok for the breakdown: a VPN marketed as your shield for anonymity reportedly left an unprotected database sitting open, exposing hundreds of millions of user records to anyone who knew where to look. No hacker required. Just a misconfigured server and a company that didn't bother to check.
We cover license plate readers, not VPNs, but the lesson is the same one we repeat about Flock Safety cameras: the danger isn't just the agency or company collecting your data on purpose, it's what happens when that data sits in a database nobody secured properly. Flock markets its ALPR network as a tool for public safety, but like a free VPN, the actual protections depend entirely on policies you can't see and enforcement you can't verify. A city council vote to 'enable audit logs' means nothing if nobody's checking them.
Whether it's a VPN company or a police department's camera vendor, the pattern holds: convenience gets sold as protection, and the fine print on where your data goes and who can access it rarely gets read until it's too late. If you want to see how exposed your own neighborhood already is to automated tracking, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on unaccountable data collection where you live, our take-action page has concrete steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Mading Thok, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.