Free services have limitations compared to paid ones. Let’s see what you have to give up in the case of free VPNs.
Not everyone who wants to use a VPN is ready to pay for the service monthly. Free VPN service providers promise anonymous browsing for nothing in return. But is all that glitters gold? If you go a little beyond the mere price, you understand several things. Online, free VPN services aren’t easy to find, for a good reason. Paid VPNs don’t use earnings to go shopping – their servers need ongoing maintenance. Encryption techniques must constantly be updated, and physical servers in different locations worldwide have costs to bear, ensuring fast connections and the development of dedicated apps.
A “free VPN” implies that the service provider must somehow recover costs, compromising on the quality of the service or the security standards. Each provider is different, but a free VPN is likely to be made available because the company providing it is making other money and is not interested in your security and anonymity. They could also use the free VPN bait to get your data and sell it to other companies, for example, for commercial purposes, giving you the opposite of what you hoped for: absolute lack of privacy.
Are our free VPN apps unsafe?
Sharing your information with a company to use a VPN service might seem harmless. But there could be severe repercussions if your data is sold to other companies or
stolen because the security systems of VPN for Windows providers aren’t that great. A recent study (article in English!) Of VPN providers shows how many providers are not bona fide. In addition, the smartphone apps of these VPN services can compromise your security: they ask for permissions that have nothing to do with the VPN services or are used to install malware, causing significant problems for whoever installed the app.
The numbers are awe-inspiring: 35% of the 283 apps available in the Play Store contain malware. Digging further, the researchers found that some of these apps do not use encryption, leaving the devices open to attack.
When it comes to free VPNs, it is pretty easy to find many such services online, many of which seem perfect after a first glance. But how many of these keep their promises? Can a free service offer a level of protection similar to that provided by a paid VPN?
As we have now learned, it is pretty easy to end up in the trap of apparently perfect products but which, once downloaded, offer very few functions for free or worse, do not work at all, leading to a considerable waste of time. All the more reason, when it comes to VPNs, it is essential for several reasons to rely on providers who operate severely and transparently and who have several years of experience behind them so that we can protect our connection.
Let’s not forget that using a Virtual Private Network potentially puts all our data and the sites we visit into the hands of the service manager; this happens because, to work, a network of this type uses several servers scattered in various countries of the world and we choose which server to connect to with a unique tunnel, which makes the connection impossible to intercept and spy on (which is why the best free VPN for Windows are gaining momentum).