"Every user is exit node" concept in addition to legal question raises more practical questions. What are you going to do if majority for your users (and when you call something "free" the chance increases) will be from countries like China, Russia, Iran and other where government controls and blocks a lot of the websites and services? And I'm talking not about surveillance but about actual block of the IP subnets like Russia did to AWS, DO and GC when they tried to block Telegram.
Also on the website you declare
> No bandwidth caps. No throttling. Stream all day, and download away. Unlike other VPNs, FreePN will never bottleneck your connection.
Sorry but this is simple lie. If we will take Turkmenistan (their internet censorship is better than China's one if you wonder why I take this unknown country) max bandwidth you can get as average citizen is about 2mbps. And there will be users (exit nodes) from TM for sure so for external users there will be bottleneck.
- What happens if someone downloads CP through my home connection?
- How do you plan to block ads with both Chrome and Firefox moving to DNS over HTTPS?
- Right now we're still undecided / exploring different ways of monetizing the product! (something similar to Adblock-Plus though is our leading idea). - We're working on a way to disallow users from acting as exits for certain kinds of traffic - so you'll be able to categorically block certain kinds of sites through the UI in the near future. - Even with DoH on by default in the browser, we can still override / specify a DNS server.
Let me know if you still have questions / any of the above is unclear!
To block something you should know that it exists. Do you have full and actual list of CP resources? I doubt. So what is the point of ability to block something if you even don't know that it exists before it is too late. The only way to deal with it are whitelists but who will use "VPN" if only certain websites will be accessible?
> We're working on a way to disallow users from acting as exits for certain kinds of traffic - so you'll be able to categorically block certain kinds of sites through the UI in the near future.
How does this stop someone posting ISIS propaganda to Twitter? Or uploading CP to Google Drive?
> Even with DoH on by default in the browser, we can still override / specify a DNS server.
Can you? Browsers don’t respect the system’s DNS settings even with plain old DNS over UDP so I don’t think that’s the case. I might be missing something though!
> - we plan to build in something similar to HTTPS Everywhere to the product, to automatically upgrade connections (and we only route traffic on ports 80 / 443 (optionally 53)). - we also plan to build in the ability to allow peers to block certain categories of traffic from going over their connection (using blocklists similar to those used by Fortiguard -- so you could block all torrenting sites, as an example).
Your product is irresponsible.
What’s the long term business model then?
We're still exploring different methods of monetization, but leaning towards an Adblock-Plus style model at the moment (but would want to keep any ads we served entirely local / we'd never send any data off device & would want to be as transparent about everything as possible). Personally, I think it keeps our interests best aligned with those of our users & helps keep the focus on preserving user privacy!
The privacy community did not react positively _at all_ to this. This also has gotten them quite a lot of negative media coverage.
Also, how are you funded short-term? Like, right now?
Short term, I'm self-funding the company (day job + previous exit of an entirely unrelated company).
We at https://safing.io/ are also self-funded, but also receive a lot of public funding. Interestingly our visions are very similar, but our technical views seem to differ a lot.
I think monetizing a privacy product without having the user pay is extremely hard. There will need to be an extremely high amount of transparency everywhere.
> I think monetizing a privacy product without having the user pay is extremely hard. There will need to be an extremely high amount of transparency everywhere.
I would agree with this wholeheartedly -- we're still very early stages, but trying to keep things as open as possible in terms of our tech & intentions with everything.
> but also receive a lot of public funding.
Curious what sources you receive public funding from?
We list everything in detail here: https://safing.io/ownership/#influences
This is all very unexpected actually! (No one from FreePN made the post here!) We've been doing some early market testing in a few Linux communities on Reddit, but full disclosure, the product is currently in an early-alpha stage (it’s only available on Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux currently, and very much under construction). We have big ambitions for the project, but it is still very early days.
Love hearing the feedback from everyone here — some very valid criticisms from a lot of folks — and on a lot of points that have been brought up here, we actually have plans to address. A few bullet points on where we are as an organization / project:
— the marketing copy isn’t set in stone — I’ve been working on the site a bunch recently & it’s very much in flux (we’ve been posting in a few Linux communities to see what the response looks like) — when we posted a few months ago about the project, in all honesty, it was a demand test to see if this would be something worth pursuing — but we’ve been trying to take the feedback from those posts to heart in our development process — we market ourselves as a VPN, but to be clear we _are_ a dVPN (distributed VPN). The peer-to-peer VPN wording on our site is mostly for the sake of simplicity. I’d point most folks to our project README on GitHub for more in-depth technical details. — right now FreePN is structured as a 1-to-1 peer connection, but we eventually plan to build in multi-tenant peer support as well as optional multi-hop routing (similar to Tor) and selective whitelisting of domains so that as a peer you can elect to categorically block certain types of sites — say torrenting. These blocklists would draw from open-source category site-lists like Fortiguard. — we do currently only route web traffic (+ DNS) — so only traffic on ports 80 and 443 is being routed (optionally port 53) — we don’t currently support IPv6 (though we have plans to add support in the future) — we don’t log traffic (you can see in the repo), and while peers logging traffic is a potential concern, that’s only true if you’re using non-HTTPS connections (we have plans to bake in something similar to HTTPS Everywhere, automatically upgrading connections).
As far as our vision for the product — our goal for FreePN is to eventually become a ‘privacy all-in-one’. We started FreePN because we care deeply about internet privacy — but trying to protect yourself online practically is a very technical and time-consuming endeavor (basically — it’s really hard to protect your privacy online, and we’re trying to make it easy). In terms of features, we’re working on building in ad-blocking as our next major milestone.
I’ll do my best to respond to everyone’s questions and concerns here this evening / in the morning & tomorrow as I’m able!