Why free VPNs are dangerous

Servers and bandwidth cost money every month. If a service charges users nothing, it earns some other way — almost always at the user's expense.

How free VPNs make money

• Selling data. All your traffic passes through the VPN. The service can record which sites you open and sell those statistics to ad networks.
• Ads and ad injection. The app shows ads and sometimes injects its own into the pages you visit.
• Your connection as a product. Some services route other people's traffic through users' devices. If someone breaks the law from your address, you get the questions.
• Malicious code. Fly-by-night apps in stores often request excessive permissions and steal data.

Warning signs

• no clear privacy policy, or a vague one;
• the app asks for contacts, SMS or file access;
• it is unclear who owns the service and how to reach them;
• promises of "absolute anonymity" without saying what exactly is stored.

How to choose

An honest service states plainly what it keeps and for how long. For example, we do not keep visited websites, DNS queries or traffic content, and we keep connection addresses and traffic volume for 30 days to detect resale of access. It is written in the privacy policy.

A paid VPN is no guarantee of honesty, but at least it has a clear model: you pay for the service, not with your data.