Papers
Topics
Authors
Recent
Search
2000 character limit reached

"I just hated it and I want my money back": Data-driven Understanding of Mobile VPN Service Switching Preferences in The Wild

Published 4 Mar 2024 in cs.CR and cs.HC | (2403.01648v1)

Abstract: Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are a crucial Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) leveraged by millions of users and catered by multiple VPN providers worldwide; thus, understanding the user preferences for the choice of VPN apps should be of importance and interest to the security community. To that end, prior studies looked into the usage, awareness and adoption of VPN users and the perceptions of providers. However, no study so far has looked into the user preferences and underlying reasons for switching among VPN providers and identified features that presumably enhance users' VPN experience. This work aims to bridge this gap and shed light on the underlying factors that drive existing users when they switch from one VPN to another. In this work, we analyzed over 1.3 million reviews from 20 leading VPN apps, identifying 1,305 explicit mentions and intents to switch. Our NLP-based analysis unveiled distinct clusters of factors motivating users to switch. An examination of 376 blogs from six popular VPN recommendation sites revealed biases in the content, and we found ignorance towards user preferences. We conclude by identifying the key implications of our work for different stakeholders. The data and code for this work is available at https://github.com/Mainack/switch-vpn-datacode-sec24.

Definition Search Book Streamline Icon: https://streamlinehq.com
References (61)
  1. Susan Alexandra. 5 popular reasons for using a vpn. https://www.globalsign.com/en-in/blog/5-popular-reasons-using-vpn, 2020.
  2. Amazon. Amazon prime video. https://www.primevideo.com/, 2023.
  3. Understanding broadband speed measurements. 08 2010. https://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/Understanding_broadband_speed_measurements_bauer_clark_lehr_TPRC_2010.pdf.
  4. Fast unfolding of communities in large networks. Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, 2008(10), Oct 2008. https://arxiv.org/abs/0803.0476.
  5. Insecure network, unknown connection: Understanding wi-fi privacy assumptions of mobile device users. Information (Switzerland), 8, 07 2017. https://www.mdpi.com/2078-2489/8/3/76/htm.
  6. Ceren Budak. What happened? the spread of fake news publisher content during the 2016 u.s. presidential election. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2019, WWW ’19, page 139–150, 2021.
  7. Client-Side Vulnerabilities in Commercial VPNs, pages 103–119. 11 2019. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.04669.pdf.
  8. Scaling instruction-finetuned language models, 2022.
  9. Sarah Coble. Vpn usage in us quadruples. https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/vpn-usage-in-us-quadruples/, 2020.
  10. Maternal post traumatic stress disorder during the perinatal period and child outcomes: A systematic review. J Affect Disord ., 2018(225):18–31, 2018.
  11. GAN-BERT: Generative adversarial learning for robust text classification with a bunch of labeled examples. In Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, and Joel Tetreault, editors, Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2114–2119, Online, July 2020. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  12. Cyberwaters. Do streamers use a vpn (do you really need it?). 2021. https://cyberwaters.com/do-streamers-use-vpn/.
  13. BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. CoRR, abs/1810.04805, 2018.
  14. Practicing safe browsing: Understanding how and why university students use virtual private networks. CoRR, 2020.
  15. Max Eddy. Why you need a vpn, and how to choose the right one. https://in.pcmag.com/privacy/113633/what-is-a-vpn-and-why-you-need-one, 2022.
  16. Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities. BMJ, 323(7321):1103–1105, November 2001.
  17. Yahoo Finance. Global virtual private network (vpn) market to reach us$77.1 billion by the year 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/global-virtual-private-network-vpn-122300132.html, 2021.
  18. Permission-based privacy analysis for android applications. 10 2017. https://knowledgecenter.ubt-uni.net/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1230&context=conference.
  19. Metrics for multi-class classification: an overview, 2020.
  20. Sumit Kumar Gupta and Dr. Dhirendra Pratap Singh. Cbla: A clique based louvain algorithm for detecting overlapping community. Procedia Computer Science, 218:2201–2209, 2023. International Conference on Machine Learning and Data Engineering.
  21. How do users like this feature? a fine grained sentiment analysis of app reviews. 2014 IEEE 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2014 - Proceedings, pages 153–162, 09 2014. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6912257.
  22. Real-World Affinity Diagramming Practices: Bridging the Paper-Digital Gap. In Proc. CHI, 2015.
  23. Deberta: Decoding-enhanced bert with disentangled attention, 2021.
  24. How great is the great firewall? measuring china’s dns censorship. In USENIX Security Symposium, pages 3381–3398, 2021. https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec21-hoang.pdf.
  25. Hotstar. Watch tv shows, movies, specials, live cricket & football. https://www.hotstar.com/, 2023.
  26. Optuna: A hyperparameter optimization framework.
  27. Hulu. Hulu: Stream tv and movies live and online. https://www.hulu.com/, 2023.
  28. An analysis of the privacy and security risks of android vpn permission-enabled apps. pages 349–364, 11 2016. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2987443.2987471.
  29. Smartphone vpn app usage and user awareness among facebook users. pages 1–6, 10 2018. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=8550081.
  30. Latent dirichlet allocation (lda) and topic modeling: models, applications, a survey. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 78:15169–15211, 2017.
  31. The vital role of vpn in making secure connection over internet world. 8:2336–2339, 03 2020. https://www.ijrte.org/wp-content/uploads/papers/v8i6/F8335038620.pdf.
  32. An empirical analysis of the commercial vpn ecosystem. pages 443–456, 10 2018. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3278532.3278570.
  33. A look at the consequences of internet censorship through an isp lens. Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC, pages 271–283, 11 2014. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2663716.2663750.
  34. Kristina. Why do i need vpn for gaming? 10 reasons it makes sense. 2023. https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/why-need-a-vpn-for-gaming/.
  35. Bart: Denoising sequence-to-sequence pre-training for natural language generation, translation, and comprehension, 2019.
  36. Co-occurrence network of high-frequency words in the bioinformatics literature: Structural characteristics and evolution. Applied Sciences, 8:1994, 10 2018. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/8/10/1994.
  37. Eric Lim. app-store-scraper 0.3.5. https://pypi.org/project/app-store-scraper/, 2020.
  38. Measuring information leakage of dns server. In 2021 IEEE 6th International Conference on Computer and Communication Systems (ICCCS), pages 796–805, 2021. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9449155.
  39. Quantifying users’ beliefs about software updates. CoRR, abs/1805.04594, 2018. http://arxiv.org/abs/1805.04594.
  40. 403 forbidden: A global view of cdn geoblocking. In Proceedings of the Internet Measurement Conference 2018, IMC ’18, page 218–230, 2018.
  41. P. V. Mockapetris. RFC1034: Domain Names - Concepts and Facilities. RFC Editor, 1987. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1034.txt.
  42. Rebecca Moody. Vpn market report 2023: Who’s got the biggest vpn market share? 2020. https://www.comparitech.com/blog/vpn-privacy/vpn-market-share-report/.
  43. Emotional and practical considerations towards the adoption and abandonment of vpns as a privacy-enhancing technology. Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, 2020:83–102, 01 2020. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/338470351_Emotional_and_Practical_Considerations_Towards_the_Adoption_and_Abandonment_of_VPNs_as_a_Privacy-Enhancing_Technology.
  44. Netflix. Netflix-watch tv shows online, watch movies online. https://www.netflix.com/, 2023.
  45. Helmi Noman. Internet censorship and the intraregional geopolitical conflicts in the middle east and north africa. 01 2019. bit.ly/36fvwG1.
  46. A glance through the vpn looking glass: Ipv6 leakage and dns hijacking in commercial vpn clients. volume 1, 04 2015. https://haddadi.github.io/papers/PETS2015VPN.pdf.
  47. PlanB. google-play-scraper 1.0.3. https://pypi.org/project/google-play-scraper/, 2020.
  48. The art and craft of fraudulent app promotion in google play. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS ’19, page 2437–2454, New York, NY, USA, 2019. Association for Computing Machinery.
  49. Vpnalyzer: Systematic investigation of the vpn ecosystem. Proceedings 2022 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2022.
  50. "all of them claim to be the best": Multi-perspective study of vpn users and vpn providers. ArXiv, abs/2208.03505, 2022.
  51. Named entity recognition in tweets: An experimental study. In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2011.
  52. “short is the road that leads from fear to hate”: Fear speech in indian whatsapp groups. In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021, WWW ’21, page 1110–1121, 2021.
  53. J. M. Saldana. The coding manual for qualitative researchers. SAGE, 2015.
  54. Attributes affecting user decision to adopt a virtual private network (VPN) app. CoRR, abs/2008.06813, 2020. https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06813.
  55. “go eat a bat, chang!”: On the emergence of sinophobic behavior on web communities in the face of covid-19. Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021, 2021.
  56. Dallas Thomas. 20 privacy & security settings you need to check on your google pixel. 2019. bit.ly/36nAtN9.
  57. Llama 2: Open foundation and fine-tuned chat models, 2023.
  58. Investigation into the security and privacy of ios vpn applications. pages 1–9, 08 2020. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3407023.3407029.
  59. Llm lies: Hallucinations are not bugs, but features as adversarial examples, 2023.
  60. Jan Youngren. Who is dominating the rising vpn market in 2023? 2023. https://vpnpro.com/blog/vpn-market-share-overview/.
  61. Dspin: Detecting automatically spun content on the web. In Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2014.

Summary

No one has generated a summary of this paper yet.

Sign Up to Summarize

Paper to Video (Beta)

No one has generated a video about this paper yet.

Sign Up to Generate All Videos Subscribe on YouTube

Whiteboard

No one has generated a whiteboard explanation for this paper yet.

Sign Up to Generate

Open Problems

We haven't generated a list of open problems mentioned in this paper yet.

Generate Now

Continue Learning

We haven't generated follow-up questions for this paper yet.

Generate Now

Collections

Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.

Sign Up