Windscribe VPN article

[fox]

Have any of you tried Windscribe? I tried the free version; it was OK (worked well; not many features), but I ultimately abandoned it when I got a good 3 year deal on PIA. I got an email this morning indicating that they had cut all ties with affiliates and are promoting it mainly by word of mouth. They linked to an article (here), which I found very interesting. It talked about how VPNs are rated and promoted. I would be curious what others think of this.

[ssfc72]

I know about Windscribe but have not used it.  My cousin, used the free version of Windscribe but was reaching the Data limitation of the free account.  He now uses the paid version so that he had a larger amount of Data, that he could download, each month.  He is satisfied with how Windscribe works but then he only has an ISP download speed of 15MBps.

There was some interesting info in the Linked article but it kept rambling on, so I got tired of reading and didn't finish the article.

[Jason]

The article was interesting in some parts but has to be taken with a grain of salt since they focus on the best features of their service and don't disclose that they used to be worse.

These trackers are used to optimize sales funnels and improve the efficiency of ads — ironically, the exact same things that VPN companies are supposed to protect you against. Is this hypocritical? Yep. Do all VPN companies mean you harm? Nope. Even ethical VPN companies can fall into this trap, and it is highly unfortunate that the game tries to force everyone to play dirty in order to succeed. If you don’t believe us, visit popular VPN websites and check to see how many trackers you are bombarded with (then compare it to ours).

When I try this in Brave, in standard and aggressive modes, WindScribe shows 6 trackers and ads and Private Internet Access (disclaimer: I use it) shows 3. What I find unintuitive is that if I use the mode to allow all trackers and ads on each site, they both show up as 0. Are they detecting this setting and showing zero trackers for reviewers probably the only users that would use that mode?

I found this article on VPN logging that I found linked in an article that the Windscribe blog mentioned and it's recent (January 6, 2021). They looked at the privacy policies of 100+ VPN providers (not just their marketing that claims "no logs". The information might surprise you.

It looks like one of the sites the Windscribe blog article says you might want to pay no mind to because the articles are sponsored, however, thebestvpn are open in their advertising policy and in how they conduct reviews. They also tell you that you should due do diligence and check other reviews, something you wouldn't expect a paid-to-promote review site to do.

[ssfc72]

Wow, good research, Jason.  That's funny how the Windscribe article warns about Trackers used by other VPN's, and they themselves show to be using more Trackers than the PIA VPN ( I also use both VPN's)
Thanks!

[Jason]

Did you try it too, Bill? I'm curious to see if others are getting the same results when they visit the webpages.

[ssfc72]

I haven't done your check of Trackers, yet,  but I will. :-)

Edit -  ok, using the Brave browser, on the main Windscribe VPN webpage, Brave showed no Trackers. However when I went to their pricing page, Brave showed 20 Trackers for the Windscribe web page.
PIA VPN showed 3 Trackers.

[Jason]

Edit -  ok, using the Brave browser, on the main Windscribe VPN webpage, Brave showed no Trackers. However when I went to their pricing page, Brave showed 20 Trackers for the Windscribe web page.
PIA VPN showed 3 Trackers.

Yikes! I get the same thing and I have Brave set for aggressive blocking. However, I looked at the actual trackers and 19 of them are for Stripe, a payment processor, I believe. And the other one is for Paypal. I've used something called Stripe on a few websites before. It basically allows you to pay via pretty much any method other than cash. They appear to be graphical elements. Still not sure why it has to track each graphical element however the URL also has "event" in it which is used in event-driven programming.
 
I forgot that you'd have to install Brave to check for trackers or... maybe Opera has an extension for this? Did you install Brave just for this or did you want to test it anyway?

[ssfc72]

I already had the Brave browser installed, so I was able to try out the test for Trackers, like you did.
I have kept  using the Brave browser because it gets rid of the awful, annoying ads that the KawarthaNow news webpage and the Examiner webpage bombards you with.  My Opera browser, with an adblocker extension, does not strip out these annoying type of ads.
I normally will allow a website to show ads, if they are not annoying.  I find websites that have ads that are flashing, playing looped video clips or take up a large portion of a webpage, to be annoying.

[Jason]

I normally will allow a website to show ads, if they are not annoying.  I find websites that have ads that are flashing, playing looped video clips or take up a large portion of a webpage, to be annoying.

Me, too! That's the other reason I like Brave, they've made a system to reimburse content producers by looking at ads coming up in the Brave browser and distributing the money from that to them based on how often you visit. I don't find the Brave Ads to be annoying except that they don't have a huge sign-up of advertisers so the same ads show up a lot, mostly cryptocurrency products.