Comment by fragmede
15 hours ago
Hola is the big one, but in practice, if we hypothesis that no one's running a VPN as a charity, free VPN products need to make money someway, and if you're not paying to use it, how else are they gonna make money?
So basically be suspicious of every single "free" or suspiciously cheap VPN. Go with known brands that come recommended by mulitple people, especially from people "in the know".
Though PirateSoftware (a person) has a good bit on why he doesn't advertise for VPNs on his channel.
Hola's worst division got spun out into a separate company, Bright Data. Bright Data's worst innovations since "Free VPN" are using those "Watch this ad for 30 seconds for bonus in-game currency" things in many, many awful mobile games and using those as a "opt-in" signal to use the user's device for those 30 seconds (or however long) as an exit node for whatever scanning/botting processes they resell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_Data