Sorry, we meant to say VVPN but Cortana Copilot autocorrected it. It's a virtual VPN, you get to feel like your browsing is private without wasting processor cycles on silly little things like added layers of encryption.
Enough of this nerd talk though, let's get Edging(tm)!
The security researcher is an employee for Brave, a competitor that makes a browser too, and sells a white-label VPN that you also purchase and enable from the browser.
I would touch neither Edge "VPN",
nor "Brave" VPN.
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?
If they're words and they came from Microslop, they're lies. No exceptions.
Sure. It is a user data collection funnel, developed with love and care, as to maxize MS shareholdee value, and increase the size of Bill Gates's bank accounts.
No one should use it.
The original use case for this stuff was unencrypted HTTP with a public WiFi connection, in which case your ISP is the owners of whatever shop you're in and yeah they could see everything.
If you're at home or whatever it offers effectively no benefits, doesn't "block trackers" or whatever nonsense like Nord claims, but I don't think Microsoft ever claimed that it did.
That it doesn’t handle DNS requests is DUM. It’s a VPN-lite, but just for your browser, okay, that could be useful. But without DNS it’s giving a false sense of security.
It's also not a web browser.
It's like Opera VPN: they change your location and call it a VPN, but it works like a proxy in their browser. In this case, it's powered by Cloudflare and works like a limited proxy version of WARP, connecting to the nearest server available instead of changing your country. I think a built-in VPN for the OS with an option to disable it in certain apps would be better.
😄aka iCloud private relay clone
Yeah, sure, semantics: when laydudes think about "vpns", they expect exactly a set of features provided by a proxy, so it's pretty much a marketing term nowadays. Nobody really cares whether the packets between their PC and the endpoint are wrapped in wireguard or socks5, unless some protocol happens to be blocked.
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