VPN service "Hotspot Shield" that should protect user's privacy is condemned to have sold access data

VPN serviceHotspot ShieldHas been criticized as tracking user traffic against privacy policy and selling access information to third parties. It is expected that the investigation by the American authorities will enter whether it is true that betrayal acts that "reverse the user's privacy" and the opposite betrayal are true.

FTC complaint about Hotspot Shield
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914264-FTC-complaint-about-Hotspot-Shield.html

Hotspot Shield VPN Accused of Spying On Its Users' Web Traffic
http://thehackernews.com/2017/08/hotspot-shield-vpn-privacy.html

Virtual Private Network (VPN)Is a dedicated network that is virtually built on the Internet and is used as a technology that enables secure communication and protects the privacy of users. Hotspot Shield, which provides an application that enables the VPN service, deceived users and sold privacy, as a nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) aiming to protect privacy, claimed the federation I asked the FTC for investigation.


According to the CDT, Hotspot Shield monitors the browsing history of users and records connections, redirects e-commerce traffic to specific partner domains contrary to the privacy policy "guarantee complete anonymity" He was selling the collected data to the advertiser. When CDT and researchers at Carnegie Mellon University reverse-engineered the source code of the Hotspot Shield application, the application keeps track of user data by inserting Javascript code using iframe, and the VPN has five or more different third parties I know that you are using the tracking library. We also found that the application was acquiring identifiers such as the SSID / BSSID of the wireless network, the MAC address, the IMEI number of the device.

In the report summarized by the CDT in the survey, highlights are placed on the words of user policies that Hotspot Shield was rebounding, accusing Hotspot Shield's conduct as "business practices to trick users into injustice" doing.


According to the CDT complaint, the full range of allegations of data collection of Hotspot Shield will be clarified by FTC investigation in the future, but there is a need to pay close attention to the choice of service provider when using VPN service It seems that this incident is showing off.