Urban VPN is a particularly bad offender. It intercepts all your conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI bots (glad I don’t use any), and sends them to the VPN vendor for resale. This is nuts.
Urban VPN is a particularly bad offender. It intercepts all your conversations with ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI bots (glad I don’t use any), and sends them to the VPN vendor for resale. This is nuts.
The catchphrase doesn’t mean you should be wary of free software, it means you should be wary of free services.
If a service costs you no money to use, and yet costs the operator money to provide, you should think carefully about how the operator is financing it - because it may be via capture and sale of your data, or other undesirable means.
Amazing and benevolent free software does exist (and lots of it!) but there’s a reason FOSS and self-hosted are often said in the same breath. Giving away software for free costs nothing (aside from the generosity of the developer’s time) but hosting software as a service costs money, and that’s why if a service is free you should exercise suspicion.
Also - a shoutout to our Lemmy Admins as proof that this isn’t always true, and for hosting the fediverse for free out of their own pockets, simply because it’s a cause they believe in.