Why should you be wary of free VPNs?

By using a vpn, you place great trust in its service provider. Of course, a VPN prevents your service provider from Internet or the operator of your hot spot Wi-Fi to spy on your navigation. But that doesn’t stop the VPN server operator from doing the same.

When your traffic leaves the VPN, the VPN server operator can see the websites you are accessing. If you access sites HTTP unencrypted, the VPN operator can see the full content of the pages. The Operator may keep logs of this data or sell it for advertising purposes.

Let’s put it this way, when you use a VPN, you prevent the hotel or airport hotspot and your ISP from spying on your traffic. But you let the VPN provider spy on your traffic instead. Why would you trust a free VPN provider you’ve never heard of?

The problem with “free” VPNs

A recent survey from Metric Labs, drew attention to this problem. She revealed that the majority of apps Free VPNs have ties to China and that 86% of them have a policy of privacy unsatisfactory. Some explicitly state that they transfer user data to China. Most of them had customer support emails pointing to generic personal email accounts, on services like gmail Where Hotmail. These services do not seem worthy of your trust.

If you’re using a VPN to protect your privacy or evade internet censorship, you probably don’t want to use a China-based VPN. China aside, you also wouldn’t want to use a dodgy VPN hosted in a country with a less repressive government. The company can simply capture and sell your data. Or it can keep lots of logs and, if you’re using a VPN for something like BitTorrentyou probably don’t want to choose one that logs all your traffic.

What you should use instead

Stay away from free VPNs. Hosting a VPN server is expensive, so why would these companies give you a free service and not get anything out of it?

However, as a free VPN for occasional use, we recommend TunnelBear or PrivadoVPN, both of which offer the necessary guarantees to be considered secure (location, no-logs policy, etc.). The company’s business model is to sell you unlimited VPN data. It’s like a free sample every month, but it might be enough if you only need VPN service occasionally.

If you really want to use a VPN to protect your privacy, torrent, circumvent censorship, or circumvent geo-restrictions online, we recommend that you research and pay for a service you find trustworthy. We have a guide of the best VPN services. Your VPN provider stands between you and all of your online traffic, and they can see it. You need to find a company with a privacy policy and a reputation solid. You will have to pay for this.

For absolute privacy and anonymity, you should try Tor. Tor is free, but not nearly as fast as a VPN. It is not a tool to use for all of your internet traffic.