The UK's Advertising Standards Agency has banned a NordVPN commercial for misleading viewers about the privacy risks of using a public Wi-Fi network without also having a VPN.

In NordVPN's ad, a man is walking down a train cubicle giving his credit card details, passwords, and photographs to strangers on the train with a voiceover saying that the man is a "hackers' best friend."

The voiceover continues to say that "your sensitive online data is just as open to snoopers on public Wi-Fi," before showing the man using the NordVPN app to protect his data. According to a post by the ASA, nine people complained to the agency about the suggestion that using public Wi-Fi without a VPN was so vulnerable it was akin to openly telling strangers your passwords and personal information.

NordVPN responded to the claim, saying that HTTPS-protected sites did not "mean the site was legitimate, nor was it any proof that the site had been security-hardened against intrusion from hackers." Moreover, the company said that "most public Wi-Fi hotspots were considered insecure since the majority had very primitive security parameters and non-existent or very weak passwords available to everyone."

The ASA disagrees. While it acknowledged that data threats could exist when using public Wi-Fi without a VPN—such as Evil Twin and MiTM attacks—the impression the ad gave was that public networks were inherently insecure.

"We considered consumers would understand that use of public Wi-Fi connections would make them immediately vulnerable to hacking or phishing attempts by virtue of using those connections. Therefore NordVPN needed to demonstrate that using public networks posed such a risk," the ASA concluded.

The ad was last broadcast on April 1, according to NordVPN.

VPN use among consumers is surprisingly low; in a survey run by PCMag, 70 percent of people said they never used a VPN, despite concerns about Facebook's data breaches, net neutrality, and Congress allowing ISPs to sell anonymized data—all of which made people more concerned about where their personal data is being used.

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