Spoiler . Its a secret alien race <| sep |> Because the OpenVPN GUI is open source and almost all provider applications are closed source and basically black boxes . Who knows what they are really doing ? There have been at least one case with CyberGhost where the client was installing a root certificate on the PC to filter web traffic this has been removed from the lastest client version and they where harvesting unique hardware ids and sending them to their servers . They propably don ' t want to do bad things with these , but by being so shortsighted and implementing something into your privacy and security minded product that could pose a potential privacy andor security risk they clearly don ' t know how to write software with privacy and security in mind . Therefore closed source software that does things that are security or privacy oriented are better open source , because some developers don ' t fully understand the consequences that the code in their software could have .