The point of installing a VPN, for most people, is to reduce the number of parties who can see what they do online. The uncomfortable finding in this research is that a meaningful share of the most-downloaded free and freemium apps in the US market do the opposite: they route your traffic through servers operated by companies legally required to hand user data to a foreign government on request. In June 2026 alone, Apple and Google approved more than 13.2 million downloads of the VPN apps in the study, including more than 3 million downloads of the Chinese-owned category. That’s…