Decentralized Privacy

Comparing VPN Models: Centralized vs. Decentralized Structures

The current VPN provider market can generally be divided into two organizational structures:

Centralized VPN providers

• Also known as commercial, corporate or traditional VPN providers.

• Services are operated by a single company that manages all servers, data, and operations.

• Pros: Convenience, simplicity, speed, volume, consistency, support.

• Cons: Single point of failure, privacy and ethics lack, low access, easily influenced by governments.

Decentralized VPN providers

• Also known as dVPN or ethical VPN providers.

• These services are operated through a distributed network of independent nodes.

• Pros: Privacy, anonymity, wider access to restricted content, no governmental control.

• Cons: Low quality, slow, poor management, lacks consistency, small networks, risk of tampering.

Why worry about traditional VPN providers?

The biggest flaw of traditional VPNs is that they are controlled by a single entity, which inherently exposes user to structural vulnerabilities, preventing them from being fully private and secure.

This fact is often contested by corporate VPN providers, yet court cases repeatedly prove it true.

Traditional VPN providers force consumers to trust them blindly and proceed to blatantly violate user privacy, either by willingly exploiting data for commercial purposes or being compelled by laws, or other third parties such as governmental interference.

Why worry about data brokerage?

Data brokers thrive in the digital age by collecting, analyzing, and selling vast amounts of personal data, often without users' knowledge or consent.

When centralized VPN providers are involved, the risk of data exposure increases significantly as a large amount of commercial providers share data with third-party companies, including data brokers.

This creates a scenario where the VPN provider, which is supposed to protect user privacy, becomes a gateway for data exploitation and users often unknowingly have their browsing habits, location data, and personal information harvested and sold to brokers who profit from this highly sensitive data.

What about decentralized VPN providers?

Although decentralized VPNs are, by definition, a wiser choice for user privacy, they are not without their flaws, often falling short of meeting average expectations in terms of quality and performance.

While decentralized VPN networks excel in providing greater privacy by distributing control across multiple nodes, they often struggle a lot to match the quality and speed of commercial VPN services.

The underlying technology of decentralized VPNs is indeed more private, but this comes at the cost of slower native speeds. This slowdown is further multiplied by the use of domestic-grade hardware and home connections, making the performance of many decentralized VPNs insufficient for average users, especially for activities like streaming video where privacy may not be a primary concern.

Provider Summary

Understanding the differences, advantages and disadvantages between these two structures is important when evaluating which VPN provider best suits your needs as a consumers.

The important takeaways that we believe consumers should be aware of are:

• Commercial VPN solutions do not shield consumer privacy.

• Many commercial and free VPN solutions sell your information to data-brokers.

• Decentralized VPN solutions do not sufficiently serve consumer convenience needs.

• Most VPN providers in each category will under-perform worse than mentioned pros and cons.

DEVPN's solution

For a detailed overview on how DEVPN provides a solution for the above challenges, see this chapter.