Doing useful VPN research starts by collecting data, and that can be a very slow process. At VPNResearch, we’re developing a number of custom VPN projects to automate operations and deliver lots of useful information in a very short time.
These are all at an early stage, but even now they can quickly gather lots of relevant details, giving us new ideas and helping to generate useful and original research.
(The projects are private to us right now, and we’re not planning on sharing them with anyone. But that may not be the case forever. Watch this space.)
VPNCrawler
Researching the VPN world can be surprisingly difficult. Even answering basic questions like ‘how many VPNs are there?’ and ‘which VPN apps have the most downloads?’ is far more tricky and time-consuming than it sounds.
VPNCrawler uses multiple search and other techniques to crawl the web, identify VPN apps and collect data on them. As we write, it has found 777 Android VPN apps along with their US rating; the percentage of one star ratings; the vendor; number of downloads; last update time; whether they contain ads, in-app purchases or have passed Google’s MASA check; the vendor’s privacy policy URL and email address.
VPNCrawler also collects data on iOS and Microsoft Store VPN apps, along with VPN browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge. The stores don’t provide as much information as Google Play, but the data is still very useful in helping us look at the VPN industry as a whole.
VPNetworks
VPNetworks can automatically collect the latest VPN country and location lists from more than 220+ VPN websites (or, in some cases, via a provider’s API.)
This gives us lots of useful industry-level information, including average overall network size, the most (and least) well served countries and cities, and details on, say, which VPNs have the most locations in every continent.
But VPNetworks has lots of interesting extras. Just one: give it a provider’s location list and it can convert the countries and city names into positional information (latitude and longitude), then export the results as a KML file, ready to import and show on any Google map.
VPNews
Ever tried to find out what’s new with a VPN? It can take forever because providers generally spread the details all around their website and social media accounts.
VPNews knows about news sources for 46 popular VPNs. Supported types include blog posts, Twitter and YouTube feeds, GitHub updates, Release Notes pages, iOS and Android app store updates, public vulnerabilities (CVEs), bug bounty announcements, RSS feeds, and more.
In a click or two we can leave VPNews searching sometimes 20+ sources per provider, checking item dates to make sure they’re within the period we’re after, removing any duplicates or less interesting items and presenting us with a summary of what’s new. It’s a real time-saver which helps make sure that we don’t miss important provider updates.
VPN testing tools
We have several smaller testing tools to help us assess and compare VPNs.
AutoSpeedTester can automatically run speed tests using multiple speed test sites, collect the results and calculate median download speeds.
BlockTester assembles the latest phishing or malware URLs from top resources, tries to access them and displays the results, very helpful for checking those ‘we block malicious sites’ claims.
Measuring a VPN’s unblocking performance is normally a very slow process, so, you guessed it, we created an automated tool to help. It’s proved really difficult to do this reliably on every site, but the tool is good enough to be useful, and we’re hoping to improve it further over time.
