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Privacy researcher debunks Microsoft Edge’s free VPN marketing, says it's "NOT a VPN"
(www.windowslatest.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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From what I can tell... that is actually what most people WANT in their VPN. They don't care about privacy or anonymizing data. They just want to hide information from the LAN admin and/or appear to be in a different region for the purposes of content (used to be so they could watch European Netflix. Now it is so they can watch Colorado Pornhub...).
I dunno. I've been in far too many Internet Arguments (TM) with people over what they ACTUALLY think a VPN is. People watch ltt's ads and figure they just pay for a VPN and leave it on 24/7 and that will solve all their problems. When the reality is that they are actively ignoring their actual cookie and activity based footprints and it just means that Google et al have a note that says "John Doe of 123 Fake Street in Bumfuck Wisconsin connects via an endpoint in Denmark".
And while I wouldn't trust microsoft at all for... anything? Do y'all really think those black box companies paying youtubers to lie to you about what VPNs do aren't collecting your data?
“I need a vpn”
Why?
“Privacy”
You trust SuperNeatVPN headquartered in $unregulatedCountry more than your own ISP? It’s all TLS now anyways.
“I run a VPN because Joe Rogan says I need to in order to be secure”
Man, do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is when people run VPNs on their BYOD or work device (hey I don’t manage it, I’m just the MSP), have an established history of popping up all around the world, and then eagerly click the phishing links?
https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
EDIT: If you do absolutely need privacy, then use Tor.
Tor exit nodes are vulnerable to various levels of attacks.
But it also doesn't change the underlying problem. If you put ALL of your traffic through Tor? Cool. You have accomplished nothing (other than flagging yourself because of what exit nodes you are accessing from) because your cookies and even behavior are still being correlated.
Like... it doesn't take much to question why FightThePower_6969 looks at both /r/antifa101 AND /r/denver, for example. Ooh, and they also look at /r/warhammer40k and have a cookie from this website listing bus schedules and...
I do agree that tor is an amazing (if problematic) tool and it is generally the gold standard for when you need to obfuscate traffic in a way that doesn't involve giving mullivad your credit card number. But people still need to understand what traffic they are putting into each different port. And even realize that there are some truly nasty tracking methods out there that can do nasty stuff with even OS level DNS caching between browsers.