Why You Shouldn’t Use a Free VPN
From the connection with friends to the management of our finances, a large part of our life takes place digitally. In an effort to recover part of their privacy, many turn to VPNs. However, although VPN can help, in most cases, free VPNs are not a risk to take. Here is why.
You are the product
As the old adage says, if you don’t pay for a product, you are the product.
This is nowhere more obvious than the modern Internet, which is largely taken care of by advertising, personal or other. Although advertising is generally quite harmless, the type of data collection that occurs while you use a VPN raises more important ethics and confidentiality issues.
Presumably, whoever uses a VPN does for a good reason: they try to maintain their privacy, they try to circumvent a geobloc on something, they try to bypass the laws of censorship in their country, or a number of other reasons.
Whatever the details, the circumstances tend to require some confidence between the user and the VPN supplier. However, the free model puts both directly in conflict.
A free VPN supplier must generate income in one way or another, and they are able to collect and monetize the information you are trying to hide first.
I am not saying that all free VPNs are malicious – in distance. However, the reality of the arrangement is that their motivations are always a little suspicious, and I avoid them completely accordingly.
Unreliable security and audits
Even if a free VPN supplier acts completely benignantly and manages your data as responsible as possible, there are other potential traps associated with free VPNs that give me a break.
Maintaining a great secure VPN service is not an easy task – it takes a whole team of experts and security programmers. Free VPN services have and will probably still have trouble matching the paying VPN services in this regard. In practical terms, you are likely to meet worse security measures on a free VPN than most of the most paid, especially if you stick to the main renowned players.
It is also quite rare for a free VPN service to have and publishes third -party security audits, which search their safety and data processing practices to ensure that they actually meet the standards they establish.
Generally slow and leg
Because they are free, free VPN services tend to have a lower maximum bandwidth and higher latency than paid services.
It is not necessarily a rupture device, but it means that free VPNs are often not suitable for many things for which people might want to use them, such as the streaming of geoblocked videos.
They have limited features
Even if you manage to find a free VPN service that respects your privacy, manages your data well, has excellent safety practices and audits, * and * is not slow, you are always better looking for a paying VPN.
VPNs more than simply hide your location, destination and traffic. Many paid VPN services offer servers designed to be specifically low latency, so they are suitable for games or other applications sensitive to latency.
Others offer servers that are more likely to work with streaming services, which is one of the most popular uses of a VPN.
If you are particularly concerned about your safety, paid VPNs (like Mullvad) offer services that add “noise” to your traffic to make it less recognizable to AI detection algorithms.
In addition, many paid VPNs include a feature that works essentially as a pihole – Adblocker built.
They generally have a killing switch (that many free VPNs that I have checked do not do so), which disconnects you if your VPN connection is abandoned, ensuring that you do not accidentally flee your data if something is unexpected.
Are there any good free VPNs?
Despite all this, there is at least one good free VPN: Proton VPN.
Proton has solid confidentiality and a history of security, and there is no blatant reason to be wary of their free VPN. The only major drawback is that it only supports one device. There is no bandwidth or data restrictions.
If I had to opt for a free VPN, it would certainly be my first choice.
