Virtual private networks become an increasingly important part of connecting. In the beginning, these were reserved only for organizations to intercommunicate different locations with each other, to allow their internal networks to communicate with the internal networks of a remote office.
Today, VPNs have application in the domestic sphere, and it is that millions of people daily take advantage of the use of these VPN services to protect their privacy. Unfortunately, there are VPN providers that can turn out to be much more dangerous than not using a VPN frequently.
Something that we can easily realize is the wide range of providers that offer their VPNs for free. Many of these are presented as an alternative to have a much freer Internet browsing, and have access to websites and other multimedia content. This occurs mainly because there are countries that, due to various restrictions, cannot have access to certain products and / or services on the web.
Why would we distrust a virtual private network?
A detail that we must consider is that not everything that is free, can be beneficial in its entirety. It is important to know what factors we must take into account to realize if we are dealing with a VPN service provider for suspicious purposes. One of the main aspects to identify a suspicious provider is the location of its servers.
It is recommended not to use services from organizations that come from countries like the USA, Canada and even countries of the European Union like Spain or Italy. However, the latter can be somewhat confusing, after all. Because we consider that it is practically impossible to find a provider that is located in a country that does not have access to manipulate VPN traffic to a certain extent.
Remember that traffic through a virtual private network is encrypted point to point, so that all data travels through this VPN tunnel with confidentiality. In this way, we understand that it is not possible for our data to travel in a completely transparent way through the Internet network.
On the other hand, something that we should do whenever we access a service, and we do not, is reading the terms and conditions of service . This documentation is usually quite extensive, so a large majority do not read it, and directly accept the terms. Those little desire (or time) that we dedicate to reading this type of documentation is a great opportunity for several VPN providers to become very intrusive. Accordingly, each time we accept, we grant permission for them to violate our privacy.
Using VPN services can be super practical. Also, who doesn’t like free VPN services ? However, this ends up having many disadvantages. Among them, the high risk that our personal data that is generated and travel through a certain virtual private network, will be sold to third parties. There are several organizations worldwide that draw on the various databases they buy to provide services related to advertising or marketing.
We must bear in mind that, although the Internet traffic that goes from the client (us) to the server (the VPN service company) is encrypted and authenticated, once they reach the server, this data is decrypted and routed to the Internet , so it is precisely at this point that companies could capture the data that we use.
VPN providers you shouldn’t use
A common factor found in VPN providers like Facebook Onavo VPN and Opera Free VPN is the fact that they collect information. This, which travels through the supposed virtual private network, is collected in order to be able to carry out analyzes that are useful for the organization, or that all the collected information can be directly shared with third parties.
Facebook, through its Onavo VPN service , gave something to talk about in the step. It has been shown that it has collected traffic information through the tunnel, in order to improve the benefits of the social network based on user preferences, among other data. Have you heard several times that Facebook “listens” to what you say so you can have personalized ads? Well, we are facing a fairly similar situation.
HotSpot Shield is another of the non-recommended VPN services. It is a free VPN provider known several years ago. However, it started having reputational problems from the moment it was discovered that traffic information was automatically redirected to websites that were considered partners. For example, companies specialized in marketing and advertising.
PureVPN is another provider that has had problems in the past, as it had to provide information to the FBI about crime matters. However, today they firmly affirm that they do not keep any type of record or anything like that, since the company’s policies have changed internally. An important detail of PureVPN is its smooth operation and high speed it provides to customers.
As you have seen, there are VPN services that we should not use, or at least, not if the information that we are going to transmit through the Internet is personal, important or confidential.