Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are a crucial Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) leveraged by millions of users and catered by multiple VPN providers worldwide; thus, understanding the user preferences for the choice of VPN apps should be of importance and interest to the security community. To that end, prior studies looked into the usage, awareness and adoption of VPN users and the perceptions of providers. However, no study so far has looked into the user preferences and underlying reasons for switching among VPN providers and identified features that presumably enhance users' VPN experience. This work aims to bridge this gap and shed light on the underlying factors that drive existing users when they switch from one VPN to another. In this work, we analyzed over 1.3 million reviews from 20 leading VPN apps, identifying 1,305 explicit mentions and intents to switch. Our NLP-based analysis unveiled distinct clusters of factors motivating users to switch. An examination of 376 blogs from six popular VPN recommendation sites revealed biases in the content, and we found ignorance towards user preferences. We conclude by identifying the key implications of our work for different stakeholders. The data and code for this work is available at https://github.com/Mainack/switch-vpn-datacode-sec24.

翻译：虚拟专用网络（VPN）是一种关键的隐私增强技术（PET），被数百万用户使用，并由全球多家VPN提供商提供服务；因此，理解用户对VPN应用选择的偏好对安全社区而言至关重要。为此，先前的研究调查了VPN用户的使用、意识和采用情况，以及对提供商的看法。然而，至今尚无研究深入探讨用户在VPN提供商之间切换的偏好及其根本原因，也未识别出可能提升用户VPN体验的功能。本研究旨在填补这一空白，揭示现有用户在从一个VPN切换到另一个时背后的驱动因素。工作中，我们分析了来自20个领先VPN应用的超过130万条评论，识别出1305条明确提及切换意图的内容。基于NLP的分析揭示了促使用户切换的因素的显著聚类。对六个热门VPN推荐网站上376篇博客的审查显示，内容存在偏见，并发现用户偏好被忽视。最后，我们指出了本研究对不同利益相关者的关键启示。本研究的数据和代码可在 https://github.com/Mainack/switch-vpn-datacode-sec24 获取。