Top 7 Worst VPN: Avoid at All Costs!
With all the threats and hazards now associated with the use of the Internet that didn’t exist or weren’t as widespread ten or fifteen years ago, businesses and individuals are looking for ways to protect their online assets. Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, are some of the best and most efficient methods to provide privacy, security, and anonymity to one’s online experience.
Virtual Private Networks are resources to achieve content and data encryption with the intention of avoiding prying eyes on the web to look at what you do, share, download, or visit when you are online. VPNs can also reroute the traffic and the IP address (which shows the user’s location) to remote servers managed by your chosen company, away from the data-logging hands of your Internet Service Provider and from other potentially dangerous agents or situations, such as hackers, malware developers, cybercriminals, direct and personalized advertising, censorship, surveillance, and others.
VPNs can create a virtual tunnel for the customer’s information to travel. They are, therefore, excellent privacy and security tools, because they can hide the user’s real location and promote anonymous browsing. They are fantastic unblocking resources, as well, as they can spoof people’s location and let them borrow IP addresses from other countries.
POTENTIAL PITFALLS OF VPN USAGE
As you may think, VPN as a technology has been a fantastic invention. However, there are potential pitfalls that you need to keep in mind. Of course, the best brands (which aren’t free, by the way) can practically guarantee a no-leak, secure, fast, and versatile set of features and offerings. Not all VPN companies are considered good, though.
The primary objective of VPN technology is hiding your traffic and identity from your Internet Service Provider and every external agent on the web that may represent a danger. However, some brands claim that they protect your content and don’t encrypt it.
You may be surprised if you knew how many VPNs keep logs of their customers’ activity, and to make matters worse, some of them share these registers with third-parties looking to make a profit off your data, such as e-commerce and search engines, or even hackers or cybercriminals in some cases.
Using a VPN without satisfactory levels of encryption power may mean that you can be tracked by your IP address, which could be problematic if you torrent a copyrighted file or if you unblock a banned site in a specific country.
The best VPNs have broad networks, with at least a thousand of them (the best have a minimum of 3,000) in dozens of countries, while the worst VPNs often struggle to connect to ten nations and don’t have more than handful servers.
The worst VPNs are unreliable, insecure, they keep logs of your data (they have to make money somehow, don’t they?) they can put you in contact with all kinds of malware, and they don’t have security features like DNS leak protection, double VPN, split tunneling, or a kill switch. Their privacy policies are dubious at best.
Without further ado, here are the worst VPNs in the industry, the ones you should avoid:
1. HOLA VPN
Hola is known around the industry as one of the worst VPNs in the market. There is virtually no privacy if you use it, and users prioritize it above better alternatives because it is free. In 2015, the provider was caught turning users’ devices into exit nodes and selling bandwidth to third parties. Avoid using this brand at all costs.
2. EASY VPN
If you want to avoid malware, then you surely need to scratch Easy VPN off your list. The provider was ranked in the second spot on the list of the top 10 most malware-infected VPN companies. It may be a problem with the app developers, as it was also responsible of Ok VPN, the absolute most infested service in the whole Google Play Store, although it is no longer available. Easy VPN is hard on your device’s performance because it injects adware on its source code. This dangerous brand also requests the SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW permission to draw ads and other window alerts over apps that are active.
3. ZENMATE
Avoiding IP leaks is a fundamental part of the VPN technology. If your chosen brand can’t guarantee full protection of that element. Elemental activities such as torrenting, browsing, gaming, downloading content or even streaming will be dangerous. Sadly, ZenMate suffers from leaks of your IP and isn’t usually quick to respond to users. That is why your privacy can’t be trusted at their hands.
4. HIDE MY ASS
While it has some exciting and useful features that make it enticing, the fact is that Hide My Ass keeps traceable logs about users’ activity. The fact that it keeps them is disturbing, but not more so than sharing them with authorities upon request. Just like it happened in 2011 when the FBI was able to track the ventures of a hacker. Thanks to an HMA’s IP address. As it turns out, the law enforcement agency got the cybercriminal’s activity logs from HMA and used them to prosecute him.
5. IP-SHIELD VPN
IP-Shield VPN has a troubling history with third parties when the idea of VPN is to keep them off your back. The fact that this brand was embedding third-party tracking libraries into Android VPN apps is concerning and makes it one of the worst VPNs in the industry. IP-Shield makes money by monetizing personalized ads.
6. OPERA FREE VPN
Opera, the famous web browser, now comes with a free VPN that is supposed to enhance privacy. Actually, it is not a VPN service, but a web proxy instead, and it collects data about its users and shares this information with third-parties.
7. SUPERVPN
A CSIRO study found that SuperVPN isn’t so “Super:” it was the most malware infected of the free VPNs available in the market, according to the VirusTotal scanning resource. It found Trojans, adware, malvertising, riskware, spyware, and more. Frightening.
In conclusion, VPN as a technology is a handy resource to have, but you need to study and research. It may take some time, but you will be able to filter the worst VPN apps in the market. Only consider those that can protect your privacy and digital assets.