Hey all, so I randomly decided to check over Windscribe’s VPN relationship chart again to look over some stuff on various providers. I always make sure to check the sources rather than just taking what it says and I already use Mullvad so it was really just mindless reading more than anything.

But going through Surfshark’s entry, there was this

[3] SurfShark’s TrustDNS app is used to collect data on the user for advertising and marketing purposes.

Advertising. We may receive certain information about you (cookie id, mobile device id, when you use our Trust DNS app – advertising IDs, in app events, such as in-app purchase or amount and type of ads watched, information about what browser, network, or device is used to access and use Trust DNS) from certain advertisers and advertising partners for advertising purposes. Our advertising partners help us deliver more relevant ads and promotional messages to you, which may include interest-based advertising and account-based advertising." Legal basis for the processing of personal information is our legitimate interest to deliver relevant ads and promotional messages to you."

The source they provided to find the privacy policy was: https://surfshark.com/trust-dns

Obviously a VPN company ever making something that does all this is… Pretty bad? From what I can tell looking up stuff it was launched in September 2019. For how long it lasted I have no real clue. Best I can find was this Github repo developed by someone who has like no other commit or repository history that only hosts DNS servers and was last updated in 2020??? Archive.org and other sites on cachedvuew provide nothing when I use the URL above, and it just goes to the normal Surfshark homepage now.

https://github.com/TrustDNS https://github.com/SharonBarcia

This whole thing just feels very strange overall. So if someone could shed some light on this I’d be pleased!

  • BossDj@lemm.ee
    4·
    3 days ago

    I almost got sucked in. But there’s shady stuff outside of this situation anyway (hidden funding source).

    Makes me think archive should be heavily funded and used for all sources

    What I did end up finding:

    It looks like it was a downloadable mobile app that would switch your dns for you instead of manually. There were a couple of obviously-ads tech articles about it’s release and why dns is so important.

    There is a dead Google play link, too