The worst VPNs that we advise you to avoid in order to protect your privacy

 

We are in desperate need of VPN software in order to maintain our privacy while we are on the Internet. These programs or services are capable of encrypting our Internet connection, spoofing our IP address, and preventing any party or person from being able to track us and spy on our activities. As we talked to you about it last time, there is a dark side to virtual private networks.

 

Among the most important negatives that we should point out to you is a false sense of security. This means that there are some services that you cannot and cannot trust with your privacy. In fact, there are VPN services out there that are so bad, so bad that it might be best not to use a VPN at all. In this article, we will provide you with some warnings and precautions that we recommend that you follow, and we will highlight the worst VPNs that we recommend that you avoid. And remember to take a look at our current best VPN service article to surf the web freely and securely.

 

1-Free VPN services

 

Don't believe in anything free on the internet right now. All services want money in one way or another in order to be able to maintain and keep their servers running all over the world, so if the service is free, how do you expect that they will be able to continue? Certainly, it will be by selling your data to advertising companies. That is why you should never trust any free VPN service that provides you unlimited internet bandwidth.

 

2- VPN services that restrict your connection from limited servers

 

There is a group of countries called the "Five Eyes", which are the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Then this list was expanded to become the "Nine Eyes", which included - in addition to the previous five countries - France, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Then the list expanded to 14 countries, which included Belgium, Italy, Germany, Sweden and Spain.

 

Do not try to contradict it, make sure that your connection to any VPN service through these countries is an unsecured connection. There are many servers around the world in Europe and East Asia that you can trust more than these countries. The reason for this is that all of these countries are known to spy on each other or spy on their own citizens. Thus, it may be easy for the government of any of those countries to pressure VPN providers and companies to request any user's information.

 

3- Networks that failed the leak test

 

Leak protection is the most important feature you need when using VPN software because it protects your connection even when the service encounters any connectivity issues. For example, if a sudden interruption of service occurs, the so-called leakage occurs. Therefore, when searching for any VPN service, make sure that it contains the Kill Switch feature, which cuts off the connection completely until the VPN service is connected again. If you are not satisfied with the presence of the feature, you must test it yourself through the BrowseLeak or IPLEAK website and test once while activating the VPN and once without activating it, and you are supposed to get different IP addresses both times.

 

4- Networks that do not depend on the OpenVPN protocol

 

There are several encryption protocols that VPN services rely on to encrypt your Internet connection. The best encryption at the moment is OpenVPN because it is open source and can be tested by security companies for evaluation and provides the strongest protection and security systems for communications. Maybe some other services are based on L2TP or PPTP protocol but they are not trustworthy in the opinions of many cyber security experts.

 

5- Services that record your activity on the Internet

 

Naturally, the VPN service will try to encrypt your connection and fake your identity through the company's servers. But there are many companies that keep some records for themselves, whether in order to make profits with advertising companies, or whether it is a result of pressure from governments and security agencies to record the activities of their users. Some services keep your browsing history and the sites you visit, while others keep your real IP address and the time you spend using the Internet.

 

You must be very careful because most of the services that assure you that they do not save your activity may be keeping some activities in their servers, and in order to make sure of the matter yourself, you should read the terms and conditions of the service before you subscribe to it. All networks put in their terms of service the activities or things that are logged and tracked.

 

What VPNs do we advise you to avoid?

 

It is very easy to be able to find out which networks are not secure and which you cannot trust. Just look at the service reviews here and there, as there are many reviews that confirm that most of the services that we will review now are bad services that cannot be trusted because it has been proven, in one way or another, that they sell user data and violate their privacy….

 

1- Facebook Onavo VPN: Of course, the name alone can deter you. The VPN service included in the Facebook app in 2013 turned out to be Onavo, which is used to improve Facebook's products and services and to keep informed of what products and services users are using while connected to the service.

 

2- Zenmate: In 2018, VPNMentor - a website that specializes in reviewing and testing VPN networks - detected three services that suffer from a leakage problem, and these three networks were HotSpot Shield, Zenmate, and PureVPN.

 

3- HideMyAss: Some sources indicated that a person was arrested by the FBI who was using the HideMyAss service to hide his IP address, as the service disclosed the client and he was arrested and prosecuted.

 

4- VPNSecure: Some of the research and press reports found on the Internet are leaks in which some services that attempt to record user data and share them with third-party companies were revealed, including VPNSecure.

 

5- HotSpot Shield: In 2017, a privacy group accused HotSpot Shield of redirecting user traffic to partner companies, including advertising companies.

 

6- Hola: There are many reviews confirming that the Hola service is not safe to use, as it turns out that it sells user browsing data to third-party companies. Therefore, we advise you to stay away from it.

 

7- Opera VPN: A good service, but it is not that good that you can consider a powerful service to protect your privacy. Some opinions say that OperaVPN collects data, but there is no confirmation whether this data is shared with third-party companies or not.

 

8- PureVPN: Despite the company's promises that it will not try to disclose any customer's information, it has reneged on its promise and has assisted federal investigations to catch a criminal. It turns out through the leaks that they keep enough information about any user who uses the service to get online.