Does F-secure own and control proprietary VPN-servers?
Hi F-Secure,
I have read your privacy and terms of use policy for F-Secure FreeDome VPN service as well as the information presented on your product page about F-Secure FreeDome. There is no information about key unique selling points when providing a VPN-service;
1) Does F-secure own/have it proprietary VPN-servers or are the servers and capacity rented from 3rd parties?
2) If F-secure does not have its own VPN-servers, who is your provider?
3) How many (physical) servers does F-Secure have/provide for VPN-use
Comments
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Hello @Concerned
Pleaes refer this KB article describe what is F-Secure Freedome. When you start using F-Secure Freedome, your network traffic is handled in a very different way than before. F-Secure Freedome is a Virtual Private Network (VPN) product which takes over all the network traffic, encrypts it and routes it through the virtual location you've selected to use or which has been automatically selected by the product. Without Freedome, all your network accesses go directly to wherever you're trying to go.
Click here to know more about our own dedicated virtual locations/servers for Freedome.
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Hello F-Secure,
The lack of answer tells me that F-secure does not own its own nor control VPN-servers (DNS) but merely rent them from one or more third parties.
Controlling the VPN-servers is a key and essential security topic. Any VPN-provider caring for security and privacy should operate their own servers.
Can you please confirm how F-secure does it?
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Hello @Concerned
At the moment, we can confirm that our Freedome VPN currently provides 30 available virtual locations. The list of physical servers and proprietary information have not being disclosed for confidentiality reason by our Freedome team.
I will double check this with our Freedome team and will surely keep you updated.
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Having read your answer once again, I am a bit concerned and confused. You refer to "confidentiality" as well as "proprietary information".
Again, I am asking F-Secure if the company owns and control their own VPN-servers or if they use servers from 3rd party to provide the service. Using third party servers could impact privacy as well as security and I believe we should know how F-Secure is setup. Proprietary servers or rented by third party. This cannot be confidential to users of the VPN-service. If F-secure indeed does not own their own servers, mere renting capacity from third party, that should be reflected in the privacy as well as your security policy.
Please feedback your response from the FreeDome-team as soon as possible.
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Hello @Concerned
Thank you again for raising your concern regarding this topic. Our Freedome team said that we have stated in quite a few places that we use third party hosting providers. But those physical servers legally belong to us, and only we have physical access rights (like everyone does; VPN providers don't build buildings and backbone networks to host VPN servers around the world), and at many locations we use virtualisation provided by a hosting/cloud service provider. Please have a look of this similar KB article.
For some security purpose, Freedome does not, unfortunately, reveal the exact number of servers they run. But its possible for you to get the information from the network data i.e WHOIS records, traceroute... to see who our providers are. There is a number of providers (somewhere between 10-20), we don't maintain a public list.