Best Free VPN for 2024: Affordable, risk-free privacy

Free VPNs just aren’t that secure

Free VPNs can be very dangerous. Why? Because maintaining the hardware and expertise required for large networks and secure users, VPN services have expensive bills to pay. As a VPN user, you either pay for a premium VPN service with your dollars or pay for free services with your data. If you’re not ordering at the table, you’re on the menu.

About 86% of free iOS and Android VPN apps – accounting for millions of installations – have unacceptable privacy policies, ranging from a simple lack of transparency to explicitly sharing user data with Chinese authorities, according to two independent investigations in 2018. free vpn apps with Top10VPN. Another 64% of free VPN app offerings had no web presence outside of app store pages, and only 17% responded to customer support emails.

In June 2019, Apple reportedly cracked down on apps that share user data with third parties. 80% of the top 20 free VPN apps in Apple’s App Store appear to violate those rules, according to June update in the Top10VPN investigation.

In in 202177% of apps flagged as potentially unsafe in Top10VPN’s proprietary VPN survey – and 90% of those flagged as potentially unsafe in the Free VPN Risk Index – still pose a risk.

“Downloads from Google Play apps that we flagged as potentially unsafe grew to a total of 214 million, up 85% in six months,” the report said. “Monthly installs from the App Store were flat at around 3.8 million, which is a relative increase as this total was generated by 20% fewer apps than at the start of the year due to a number of apps being no longer available.”

On Android, 214 million downloads is a lot of user login data, collected from unwitting volunteers. What is one of the most profitable things that can be done with large volumes of user login data?

You can catch malware

Let’s get this out of the way right now: 38% of free Android VPNs contain malware – despite the security features on offer, CSIRO study found. Yes, many of those free VPNs are highly rated apps with millions of downloads. If you’re a free user, your chances of catching a nasty bug are more than 1 in 3.

Ask yourself what costs less: a secure VPN service for about $100 a year, or hiring an identity theft recovery firm after some scumbag steals your bank account credentials and social security number?

It couldn’t happen to you, could it? Wrong. Mobile ransomware attacks are skyrocketing. Symantec has been exposed more than 18 million instances of mobile malware in 2018 alone, representing a 54% increase in variants compared to the previous year. In 2019, Kaspersky noticed a 60% jump in password-stealing trojans.

Malware isn’t the only way to make money if you use a free VPN service; there is an even easier way.

Ad-avalanche

Aggressive advertising practices from the free plan can go beyond hitting you with a few annoying pop-ups and quickly veer you into dangerous territory. Some VPNs slip ad trackers through holes in your browser’s media reading features, which then remain on your digital trail like a prison warden in a B-grade remake Escape from Alcatraz.

HotSpot Shield VPN earned painful notoriety for such accusations in 2017 when it was hit with Federal Trade Commission complaint (PDF) for excessive ad serving privacy violations. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University found that the company not only had a built-in backdoor used to secretly sell data to third-party advertising networks, but also used five different tracking libraries and actually redirected user traffic to secret servers.

When the story broke, HotSpot parent company AnchorFree denied the researchers’ findings in an email Ars Technica: “We never redirect our users’ traffic to third-party resources instead of the websites they intended to visit. The free version of our Hotspot Shield solution openly and clearly states that it is ad-funded, however, we do not intercept traffic with either the free or premium versions of our solutions.”

AnchorFree has since offered an annual transparency reportsalthough their value is still up to the reader. Recently, HotSpot Shield was among only a handful of VPN apps found to respect users’ opt-outs to allow ad tracking. In a November 2021 Top10VPN Studyonly 15% of free VPN apps respected the choice of iOS users when they voluntarily opted out of ad tracking. Other free VPN apps tested by Top10VPN simply ignored users’ Do Not Track requests.

Even if credit card fraud isn’t a problem, you don’t need pop-ups and ad lag weighing you down when you already have to deal with another major problem with free VPNs.

Buffering… buffering… buffering

One of the main reasons people get a VPN is to access their favorite subscription services or streaming site – Hulu, Max (formerly HBO Max), Netflix — when traveling to countries where those companies block access based on your location. What’s the point of accessing geo-blocked video content you’ve paid for if the free VPN service you’re using is so slow that you can’t watch it, despite a good internet connection?

Some free VPNs have been known to sell your bandwidth, potentially putting you on the legal hook for whatever they do with it. The most famous case of this was Hello VPN, which was caught in 2015 quietly stealing users’ bandwidth and selling it, mercenary-style, to any group that wanted to use the user base as a botnet.

Then Hola CEO Ofer Wilensky admitted that a “spammer” had caught them, but claimed in the long-running defense that this bandwidth hoarding 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 deployed as part of a botnet isn’t enough to slow you down, free VPN services also typically pay for fewer VPN server options. This means that your traffic generally spends longer hopping between remote, crowded servers or even waiting behind the traffic of paid users.

On top of that, subscription streaming sites are smart about those trying to sneak into their video services for free. These services routinely block large numbers of IP addresses that they have identified as belonging to revolving door freeloaders. Free VPNs cannot afford to invest in a long list of fresh IP addresses for users like a paid VPN service can.

This means that you might not even be able to sign in to the streaming service you paid for if your free VPN is using an outdated pool of IP addresses. Good luck loading HBO Max over that VPN connection.

Paid options keep getting 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 browse our ratings and reviews to find the right VPN software for you. If you’re looking for something mobile-specific, we are rounded up our favorite mobile VPNs for 2024.

If you want an example before you decide which service to throw your money at, we’ve got it VPN Buyer’s Guide to help you understand VPN basics and what to look for when choosing a VPN service.