User:Muslow Christopher/sandbox

VPN Proxy Master is a Virtual Private Network utility developed by Lemon Clove Pte. Limited located in Singapore. The company claims the utility package in form of application compatible with iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows OS & Chrome OS provides VPN services based on more than 6000 servers spreading over 40 countries worldwide. As on September 2020, VPN Proxy Master has over 10 million downloads in android app marketplace Google Playstore. VPN Proxy Server was in news, during December 2018 when Top10VPN, a VPN research and review website carried out an independent investigation to discover the gaps between the promises proclaimed by some popular free VPN service providers and what those actually offer, while primarily keeping focus on privacy and security aspects of the VPN users.

Services
The service provider offers both free and paid subscription for all platforms including android users for its VPN service. During 2018, several reviewers have expressed their ability to access much less number of locations than its declared servers operating over 40 countries. The service provider claims to offer AES-256 encryption while routing user data through its VPN tunnel using multiplicity of protocols including IPSec and OpenVPN. Apart from typical task of hiding IP address, the provider declare to offer servers for more specific purposes which includes second layer encryption, P2P file sharing etc. The number of users utilizing the services of VPN Proxy Master has been reported to be over 150 million as of May 2020.

Security issues and controversies
In the December 2018 Top10VPN investigation, VPN Proxy Master was considered as one among the top 20 free apps downloaded worldwide by mobile users using marketplace like Goople play store and Apple store. The concern was expressed on several aspects of the functioning and claims of the service provider as there was lack of transparency in declaring privacy policy of VPN Proxy Server when it was found to be plagiarized from the website of another VPN service provider ExpressVPN. The study also revealed that majority of the mostly dowloaded free VPN applications viz. Turbo VPN, VPN Master, VPN Proxy Master,X-VPN, Snap VPN though are owned by distinct corporate entities, those entities are very closely associated when judged from key persons associated with those respective companies. The security concern about access to the user data was the center of controversy when Turbo VPN, one of the associated VPN service provider mentioned in its privacy policy “Our business may require us to transfer your Personal Data to countries outside of the European Economic Area (“EEA”).”

Reception
Despite of the claim from VPN Proxy Master about collecting of users data only 'to maintain the service', Entrepreneur and Sixgill in another study, concluded VPN Proxy Master as one of the most insecure VPN service providers against the same parameter. Majority of cyber experts have found some features of VPN Proxy Master including geo-location bypassing, its free service, unlimited bandwidth as praiseworthy but have shown serious reservation towards the trustworthiness and privacy policy and criticized the lack of transparency along with ambiguous and invasive logging policy with the user data.