What you Should Know Before Using a VPN? Whether it is safe to use free VPN?
Read it to be safe if you are doing any illegal activity using a VPN?
Wandering if it is safe to use a free VPN? VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. When you search for a VPN, every VPN promises that they will make you anonymous and no one will know what you visit in Internet. Well that’s really not true all the time.
What VPN provider shows in ads “Be Anonymous, get the freedom of Internet “, well we are bounded by laws either it is an ISP, VPN provider or an individual, everyone will have to surrender in front of the laws. Free VPN provider makes you feel like “Get the Superpower of being Anonymous in Internet “, won’t it would be considered a super power to be “Anonymous” in the world.
You will get access to those sites which normal people can’t visit, the banned websites or geographically blocked websites and also being Anonymous. Its really a super power if you can break the law and have others forbidden access and there would be no one who knows it was done by you to get you in jail. Getting a VPN feels like you’re the superhero with a power to disappear and enter any places you would like to enter, isn’t it?
Yes, VPN makes you feel like that Superhero for a while too. But not all are trustworthy, or not all have that much power to stay on their promises either they are free VPN provider or Paid one.
So Let’s Know How do VPNs work? Is it safe to use Free VPN or Not?
When you use a VPN client, all your internet traffic gets encrypted and routed via the VPN gateway and it keeps your ISP or whoever’s providing your internet connection cannot see what you visit though it will see you’re connected to a VPN provider. Well its fine if you want that much with a VPN. And in the same way, the sites you visit won’t know where you’re connecting from, they will only see traffic appear to originate from the VPN provider.
But Wait! That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re completely anonymous, the VPN provider that you have chosen itself may well be keeping some record of your activity. Bad news is, yes most of the free VPN provider keeps it. Well even if you’re paying for the service, they’ll have your account and payment details. And may be they don’t even keep records of the sites you visit, but they may still have logs of the times you connected and your internet address, that will be used to link you with certain activity on a remote server.
Does the location of your VPN provider matter?
You choose a VPN providers that aim to protect your privacy, but they’re still subject to the law. If court order to turn over whatever records they have, they will be compelled to give all the information they have stored about you and your works on visited websites.
Well, choosing a VPN that’s of another country won’t necessarily protect you. The countries like UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, the so-called “Five Eyes” can easily access data held by any of those countries. You can make think of choosing a VPN provider based in even outside of the Five Eyes, intelligence sharing between nations is quite common.
“Free” isn’t necessarily to be free when accessing blocked websites. These services which gives you free access actually allow malicious third-parties to take out your personal data, or, even worse. They can even let ohers access your internet connection to conduct illegal things on the web.
These Free VPNs can log and keep track of all your content, your IP address, information about sites you visit, etc, well now you can imagine the consequences. The very exact thing that are VPNs meant to protect you from can do completely opposite for you. Many of these “free” services even sell your personal information to third parties, with some even going as far as placing extra ads or may even get your device infected with malwares and may even carry out criminal activity that traces to your machine.
So its like known fact that those popular free VPN servers aren’t always as safe as they claim to be to protect you from Governments eyes and malware and viruses.
How Free VPN makes you Unsafe by Using Your Connection?
It is necessarily important to research the VPN service you’d like to use. Before trying out any VPN provider just check out their privacy policy and research about how safer they can keep you.
As VPN providers like Hotspot Shield was recently accused of spying on its user’s traffic.
Although their privacy policy promises to keep all information of users secure, safe and anonymous but they were found to monitor users’ browsing data, log connection, selling data of customers to advertisers and redirecting online traffic.
This shows that though, they are free VPNs they also must have to make money some how either getting you with malware or selling your data.
And even the famous Hola Unblocker, a service that sold users’ spare bandwidth which allowed their connection to be used for malicious Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and illegal purposes for accessing anything from copyrighted content to images of child abuse.
Is there any most Secure Solution to Access Blocked websites?
The only possible way to keep yourself safe from malwares and data theft is to use paid service. Well it is not 100% secure though, but they are getting paid in a good way, so they can be trusted that they won’t do your identity theft and provide you malicious softwares. Like everything, not all paid VPNs are the same, it can’t keep you safe from Government though.
The impression that Tor VPN had for the ultimate in online anonymity was down after a FBI operation took down the largest darknet child pornography site in the world, by injecting malware into the browsers of Tor users and in the process also obtained the IP addresses of all the site members.
The ultimate truth is, there’s not any real way to be truly anonymous online. As you can imagine, even the professional hackers gets caught by government, we are just normal users who tries to access geographically blocked websites or government blocked sites.
But on the other hand for normal people, there is no Government agencies who really cares what you download or send or copy pirated things online or access some government blocked websites using VPN as these works are not life threatening. And for sure a properly chosen VPN offers more than enough protection for most purposes.
And for really breaking your anonymity needs a lot of work, patience, and court orders unless you’ve down something really bad that Government agencies are after you, then it’s just a few key strokes away sometimes. But when it comes to things like terrorist activities, planning to bomb, or posting pictures or videos of child pornography, you can never be safe. And that’s really a good thing.
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