Best Free VPN for 2024: Affordable, Risk-Free Privacy
1. Free VPNs are simply not that secure
Free VPNs can be very dangerous. Why? Because VPN services have to pay expensive bills to maintain the hardware and expertise needed to support large networks and secure users. As a VPN customer, you are either paying for a premium VPN service with your dollars or paying for free services with your data. If you are not ordering at the table, you are on the menu.
According to two independent 2018 studies of free VPN apps for iOS and Android, accounting for millions of installs, about 86% of free VPN apps for iOS and Android have unacceptable privacy policies, ranging from a simple lack of transparency to explicit sharing of user data with Chinese authorities. free vpn apps from Top10VPN. Another 64% of free VPN app offerings had no web presence outside of their app store pages, and only 17% responded to customer service emails.
In June 2019, Apple reportedly cracked down on apps that share user data with third parties. Eighty percent of the top 20 free VPN apps in Apple’s App Store appear to be violating those rules, according to a June update about the Top10VPN research.
In 202177% of apps flagged as potentially unsafe in the Top10VPN VPN Ownership Investigation — and 90% of apps flagged as potentially unsafe in the Free VPN Risk Index — still posed a risk.
“Google Play downloads of apps we flagged as potentially unsafe increased to 214 million total, an 85% increase in six months,” the report said. “Monthly installs from the App Store remained steady at around 3.8 million, which represents a relative increase given that this total was driven by 20% fewer apps than at the start of the year, as a number of apps are no longer available.”
On Android, 214 million downloads represents a lot of user login data, collected by unwitting volunteers. What’s one of the most profitable things you can do with large amounts of user login data?
2. You can catch malware
Let’s get this straight right away: 38% of free Android VPNs contain malware, despite the security features offered. CSIRO study found. And yes, many of those free VPNs were highly rated apps with millions of downloads. If you’re a free user, the chances of you getting a nasty bug are greater than 1 in 3.
Ask yourself what’s cheaper: a secure VPN service for about $100 a year, or hiring an identity theft detection company after some idiot steals your bank account credentials and social security number?
It can’t happen to you? Wrong. Mobile ransomware attacks are skyrocketing. Symantec detects more than 18 million mobile malware instances in 2018 alone, representing a 54% year-on-year increase in variants. In 2019, Kaspersky noticed a 60% peak in password-stealing Trojans.
Malware isn’t the only way to make money when you run a free VPN service. There’s an even easier way.
3. The avalanche of advertising
Aggressive advertising practices on a free plan can go beyond getting a few annoying pop-ups and quickly veer into dangerous territory. Some VPNs sneak ad trackers through the cracks in your browser’s media-reading functions, which then follow your digital trail like a prison guard in a B-grade remake of Escape from Alcatraz.
HotSpot Shield VPN gained painful notoriety for such allegations in 2017 when it was hit by a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (PDF) for excessive privacy violations in its advertising. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University found that the company not only had a built-in backdoor that was used to secretly sell data to third-party ad networks, but that it was also using five different tracking libraries and actually redirecting user traffic to undisclosed servers.
When the story broke, HotSpot’s parent company, AnchorFree, denied the researchers’ findings in an email to Ars Technique: “We never redirect our users’ traffic to third-party sources instead of the websites they intended to visit. The free version of our Hotspot Shield solution openly and clearly states that it is funded by advertising, but we do not intercept any traffic with either the free or premium versions of our solutions.”
AnchorFree has been offering annually since then transparency reportsalthough their value is still up to the reader. More recently, HotSpot Shield was one of the few VPN apps found to respect users’ refusal to allow ad tracking. In a Top10VPN November 2021 ResearchOnly 15% of free VPN apps respected iOS users’ choices when they voluntarily declined ad tracking. The rest of the free VPN apps tested by Top10VPN simply ignored users’ Do Not Track requests.
Even if credit card fraud isn’t a problem, you still don’t want to deal with pop-ups and delayed ads, when you’re already dealing with another major problem with free VPNs.
4. Buffering… buffering… buffering
One of the main reasons people get a VPN is to access their favorite subscription services or streaming sites — Hulu, HBO, Netflix — when they travel to countries where those companies block access based on your location. What’s the point of accessing the geo-blocked video content you paid for if the free VPN service you’re using is so slow that you can’t watch it, despite having a decent internet connection?
Some free VPNs have been known to sell your bandwidth, potentially making you legally liable for what they do with it. The most famous case of this was Hello VPN was caught in 2015 secretly stealing users’ bandwidth and selling it, in a mercenary fashion, to whatever group wanted to use the user base as a botnet.
At the time, Hola CEO Ofer Vilenski admitted that they had been scammed by a “spammer”, but argued in an extensive defense that this bandwidth harvesting is typical of this type of technology.
“We assumed that by stating that Hola was a [peer-to-peer] network, it was clear that people were sharing their bandwidth with the community network in exchange for their free service,” he wrote.
If being employed as part of a botnet isn’t enough to slow you down, free VPN services also typically pay for fewer VPN server options. That means your traffic will generally spend longer bouncing between distant, crowded servers, or even waiting behind the traffic of paying users.
To top it all off, subscription streaming sites are smart for those trying to access their video services for free. These services routinely block large numbers of IP addresses that they’ve identified as belonging to turnstile-jumping profiteers. Free VPNs can’t afford to invest in a long list of new IP addresses for users like a paid VPN service can.
That means you might not even be able to log into a streaming service you paid for if your free VPN is using an outdated batch of IPs. Good luck loading HBO Max through that VPN connection.
5. Paid options are getting better and better
The good news is that many solid VPNs on the market offer a range of features depending on your needs and budget. You can check out our ratings and reviews to find the right VPN software for you. If you’re looking for something mobile-specific, we’ve got you covered. our favorite mobile VPNs for 2024 collected.
If you want a primer before you decide which service to spend your money on, we have a vpn buyer’s guide to help you understand the basics of VPNs and what to look for when choosing a VPN service.
