Some time ago Opera was bought by Google.
Now it comes revived into the market with a unique niche of its own; I has free VPN
So I installed Opera and turned on VPN
To enable VPN:
From the main menu, select Settings.
Click Privacy & security on the sidebar.
Under VPN, tick the Enable VPN checkbox.
And after that I am surfing anonymously -right?
Weell..I'll get back to that.
First I checked the speed and it is about as snappy as surfing without VPN; so that is really good!
My Ip is hidden and my speed is the same.
I get a nice badge on the top right where I can turn on and off the VPN and it does work. The amount of data I can transfer is unlimited.
Time to jump up and down for joy for privacy minded people right?
Wrong!
And here is why:
I checked the DNSservers at http://dnsleaktest.com and they are all Google servers in Belgium and the Netherlands.
I was able to change the location on the top left to Germany - but still all Google servers. Then The VPN seems to break down -constantly - and "Opera is working on it" - in this case it defaults to the Dutch server. Same place that Microsoft have their servers for Europe...that are under US jurisdiction...
And here is the problem:
The owners of the servers above have the ability to associate your personal IP address with the names of all the sites you connect to and store this data indefinitely. This does not mean that they do log or store it indefinitely but they may and you need to trust whatever their policy says.
If you are connected to a VPN service and ANY of the servers listed above are not provided by the VPN service then you have a DNS leak and are choosing to trust the owners of the above servers with your private data.
Soo I guess that means that you have to trust the Google policies ..and they are not famous for respecting your privacy; they are famous for removing it.
The VPN service is supplied from a Canadian company.
Five eyes countries and even if Google wants to respect my privacy their government does not and have taped their servers before.
So don't download any illegal Hollywood movies from TPB; you will be caught before you can say "Apfelstrudel".
(Actually don't do that with any VPN - it is illegal)
The old rule applies:
If it sounds to good to be true.....then it probably is
Chances are that more of your surfing behavior will be stored than before.
Good idea though and it will work just fine against Internet stores that try to geofence their offerings.