Using a Free VPN Service? – Just Send Your Data Directly to China and Cut Out the Middleman

Millions of people use VPNs or Virtual Private Networks to protect their traffic when users are connecting to the Internet from sketchy public WiFi connections such as hotels, airports, convention centers and even coffee shops. For many companies, especially larger ones, the company provides VPN software to connect to the company network, but when it comes to mobile devices and BYOD, many times employees are left to make their own decisions.

Top10VPN, a VPN software review site looked at a number of VPN products. A link to the review can be found at the end of this post.

The reviewers looked at the top VPN software apps on both the Android and Apple stores, some of which have been downloaded millions of times. Here is what they found.

59 percent of the apps – more than half – have links to China.

86 percent of the apps have unacceptable privacy policies including lack of details, no policy at all, tracking use traffic, sharing user data with third parties and other issues.

55 percent of the policies were hosted in an amateur fashion such plain files on Pastebin or raw files on IP addresses.

64 percent of the apps had no dedicated web site at all.

52 percent of the apps customer service emails went to generic email like GMail.

And finally, 83% of the app customer support emails were ignored.

The link below has detailed information on the apps that they tested.

Bottom line, if you plan to use a VPN app on your phone – Android or iPhone – make sure that you review the app and find out the details of the company and their policies.

If your company can provide you with VPN software for your device that comes from their network equipment vendor such as Cisco or Fortinet or Juniper, that is likely the best solution. That may mean that your traffic will be routed through your company network, so if that is an issue, consider that.

Finally, like in many things, you often get what you pay for. If you need a reliable and private VPN service, consider a pay service. Curiously, bigger is not always better. Facebook offers a VPN service that very intentionally captures all of your data. When they were asked about this, they said it was to improve your experience. In reality, it is to improve their ad revenue.

Be an informed consumer.

Information for this post came from Top10VPN.

For information on what VPNs are, what they will do and what they won’t do, check out this article on ZDNet.

For C|Net’s recommendation list for good (paid) VPN services, check out this article.