How is it possible to keep it free?
The devices of our free VPN customers are used to create a secure peer-to-peer network that our commercial clients can use to securely route their traffic via various global endpoints. As a free client, you will likely not notice any impact on your resources as that happens. The data transferred in the background will be metered by your mobile operator according to your data plan.
What does this mean? What use would “their clients” need access to your network? What are they routing to through your network and how does that help with efficiency?
Their commercial clients are doing things that give IPs bad reputation or banned from services, so they use this service to get access to home IPs to use.
It would not shock me if companies like OpenAi would have used something like this so they could harvest large amounts of data without setting off usage limits. While sketchy not sure if this counts as scammy.
TL;DR: They used free VPN called Big Mama.
From their FAQ: https://bigma.org/faq.html
So it’s literally up front and in their FAQ that they do this. So why is this a story?
Because scary words!
What does this mean? What use would “their clients” need access to your network? What are they routing to through your network and how does that help with efficiency?
IP addresses.
Their commercial clients are doing things that give IPs bad reputation or banned from services, so they use this service to get access to home IPs to use.
So scammers and similar ilk?
It would not shock me if companies like OpenAi would have used something like this so they could harvest large amounts of data without setting off usage limits. While sketchy not sure if this counts as scammy.
Innovation when big tech does it, breaking ToS when Joe Doe does it