If you decide to try the free trial, just remember that you will have to give your credit card details and cancel before you're charged. After the installation, you’ll have the option to take the 7-day free trial for the premium version, but you can ignore that and just connect to the service to use the free version. Having said that, getting started isn’t terribly convenient. This means you won’t be able to stream Netflix (Hotspot Shield actually blocks access itself), but your sensitive information will be perfectly safe from prying eyes, which is especially important if you’re worried about shopping or conducting financial operations online.

You will have to suffer through an ad here and there, and you can only use the one server location that the platform assigns to you, but it’s worth it if privacy is your topmost concern. Hotspot Shield Free tops our free VPN list thanks to everything you get, no charge: 500MB of daily data traffic (that’s about 15GB per month), military-grade encryption, and beginner-friendly apps, regardless of the platform. If you're looking to get maximum security, we'd always recommend a paid option – our top three choices are briefly mentioned below – but for casual browsing a free VPN can be a very useful tool to have at your disposal. The most important things to pay attention to when choosing the right free VPN, are the level of security it offers, whether its limitations are a deal-breaker for you, the level of privacy and the existence of the no-logging policy, as well as what kind of information do you have to give up to get access to it. Yes, limitations do apply with just about all of them, but considering you’re getting a free privacy service, it’s something many can live with. Luckily, not all free VPN services are low-quality or extremely limiting. Or worse yet, they offer a free VPN service, but provide very poor service. However, once you start searching, you realise that many such platforms offer their services for a fee. This is due to various reasons – governments spying on you or censoring content you can access, streaming platforms geographically restricting their own content, ISPs throttling your connection, hackers trying to steal your private data, you name it.Ĭonsidering all these issues, it’s no wonder many people are looking at VPNs. Virtual private networks ( VPN) have grown in popularity during the past decade because they offer privacy and anonymity online in a time when it is needed the most.

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