Yesterday, Opera announced they’ve
added a free VPN client with unlimited data usage in the latest developer version of their browser. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Michal Špaček, a web developer and security engineer based in Prague, researched the way Opera’s VPN works and discovered there’s more marketing than security behind Opera’s claims.
“What Opera offers is not a VPN as such. It’s just a proxy for the browser. You still need a
full VPN if privacy is what you care about (and you should care about your privacy). Other tools you use, including for example email clients like Outlook, won’t use this ‘VPN’,” Špaček told Help Net Security.
“There’s also a potential privacy issue: when setting up the VPN, the browser requests something called device_id, this is subsequently sent in every request to the proxy and it survives browser restarts and reinstalls unless you also delete your user data when uninstalling. This might be used for user tracking for whatever purpose,” Špaček added.
