Are Free VPNs Safe and Can They Be Trusted?
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With the increased interest in privacy and cyber security online, both individuals and small businesses have adopted them into greater use. In fact, for 2018, VPN usage increased significantly at an average of 165% compared to the previous year. Globally, 25% of internet users deploy a VPN, with the most common use case scenario for accessing entertainment content, such as Netflix.
A barrier to VPN entry for many is that most VPN services have a cost. This causes people with a penny to abandon a VPN that would protect against hacking attempts, and provide them with a higher level of online privacy, despite the modest cost.
In an effort to include these people, over the past few years, a new category of VPN service has emerged, specifically the Free VPN Service. They generally have significant downsides compared to their paid stablemates, such as lower monthly data caps, lower throughput speeds that make streaming video quite a pain, and user limitations on a low number of devices. The service also tends to be choppy, either with intermittent outages, or basically not working.
Despite these shortcomings, some people insist on using them, and are lucky with the free tier offers from the likes of HotSpot Shield, TunnelBear, WindScribe, and Opera browser with its integrated VPN offering (although our experience differed with the latter one).
While the Progressive Opera browser has a free VPN built in, we’ve noticed that it hasn’t been able to make the connection to initiate the encrypted tunnel for the past several months (Image credit: TechRadar) (Image credit: Image credit: TechRadar)
This raises the question as to whether these free VPNs are secure, and can they be trusted with your data? After all, if the point of using a VPN is to control your privacy, why would we trust your personal information in our lower basement, the lowest bidder? Also, these companies are generally not altruistic, and they have to reap a profit from somewhere. This goes back to the phrase “if you don’t pay for it, you become the product”, which raises the concern that a free VPN will have no incentive to protect your privacy, selling your data to the highest bidder.
Hola Free VPN is just one of the many free VPNs that have gained public attention lately for being unsecure (Image credit: Hola) (Image credit: Image credit: Hola)
Say goodbye to Hola
A good example of this is Hola Free VPN. Instead of creating a network of servers to host the service, Hola created a “peer-to-peer” virtual private network, in which each user acts as a node, with other users passing through your smartphone, though Hola assures users “the amount of traffic that Hola can pass through a peer on Her net per day averages less than 20 seconds of YouTube clips,” estimated at about 5MB.
Hola claims this practice keeps the cost down, but this immediately raises the concern that another Hola user’s illegal activity may be sharing your IP address and bandwidth. In fact, subsequent research by security firm Trend Micro showed that not only were Hola users used for Hola VPN nodes, but at the same time they were surreptitiously used as nodes for a commercial VPN, Luminati. Moreover, cybercriminals can incorporate HolaVPN users into a botnet attack. However, despite these serious issues, Hola Free VPN troopers work on uncertainty, claiming to have more than 184 million users.
Hidden Free VPN Secret
Now, the experience of using a poor VPN should not pollute all free VPNs. However, when the issue of free VPNs is studied, especially for the Android platform, the results are more than alarming. Posted in Proceedings of the 2016 Internet Measurement Conference, the article “Analysis of the Privacy and Security Risks of Apps Enabled with Android VPN Permission” raises some serious issues. After all, a VPN service is in a unique position to scan user traffic. As researchers studied 283 VPNs, it was found that 38% of them contain some type of malwareincluding adware, trojan,
Malicious ads, dangerous programs and spyware. If that wasn’t worrying enough, what’s even more shocking is that users aren’t aware of the security risks with this paper going on to note that “only less than 1% of negative reviews relate to security and privacy concerns,” when going through reviews of these networks Virtual Private Network on the Google Play Store, which indicates that the vast majority of users are completely oblivious that they are exposing themselves to such high risks.
Tuxler is a free VPN that doesn’t even try to hide the fact that it shares user data with advertisers (Image credit: Tuxler) (Image credit: Image credit: Tuxler)
Dick Tuxler away
For another example, let’s take a look at the privacy policy for Tuxler, a free VPN. In their privacy policy, we can see at the top that they collect user data to share with their advertisers for use in “targeted advertising services”. So much for this privacy VPN is designed to provide the user with it! At the very least, Tuxler is upfront about this, and goes on to state that the data collected includes website activity, device and browser information, contact information, account information, and financial information. Information collected about each user is used in this targeted advertising, with Tuxler’s service providers and service providers as well as “subsidiaries and related companies”.
Finally
From the examples and research provided above, yes, your data is really sold to the highest bidder by these free VPN services. Therefore, a free VPN falls into the “can be expensive free” category, and therefore should not be used. After all, isn’t your family’s privacy worth a few bucks a month?
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