You’ve hear the saying, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”. That’s true online, too. (IM NewsWarch is still the exception.)

Free services have bills to pay, just like everyone else. They will find a way to pay those bills; almost always from their users.

One extreme example of this is the Hola service (http://hola.org), a proxy that anyone can use at no charge. Wonderful;right?

Well, not necessarily. When you sign up for the service, you are agreeing to their terms and conditions and their privacy provisions.

In the terms, they say that they can use your PC as a part of their proxy network. They send traffic to your computer and, using your computer, to any website anywhere in the world, in order to hide the origins of the identity of the computer making the request.

Common sense ought to warn you that there’s something fishy about that tactic, since you have lost control over who is connecting to you and where they are ultimately going. But it gets worse.

As Ehacks.net reports, “First, it increases the bandwidth usage on the device and reveals your device’s IP address to the target service or website which you may not always want.” If your computer becomes Grand Central Station, you can have all kinds of bad actors routed through your computer.

The point of the Ehacks article is that you should always read the terms and conditions of any service you use. There could be dangers lurking there

You can read the whole article here: Beware: Hola VPN turns your PC into an exit node and sells your traffic

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