42 2 - 15 October 2019
Windscribe
windscribe.com
Windscribe has
been our favourite free VPN
for quite some time. It’s
available for all the major
platforms (you can even
instal l it on your router) and
it provides you with 10GB
a month ofdata, unlimited
connections and access to
more than 10 countries
(paying customers get
servers in 100 cities across
55 countries). You can get afree one-day trial of th e
paid-for Pro version by
clicking the Team Garry
button (the floating green
circle) on the website and
asking for a Pro trial.TunnelBear
http://www.tunnelbear
.com
TunnelBear is available for
Windows, macOS, Android
and iOS. You get a ti ny
500MB of tr affic for free per
month, which you canincr ease by an extra 1GB
by tweeting about the
service. Its browser
extensions for Chrome and
Opera (but not Firefox)
can disguise your location,
but they don’t offer the
samelevel of protection as
the full software.
TunnelBear doesn’ t sell
your personal information,
but instea d makes its money
from paid subscriptions.ProtonVPN
protonvpn.com
ProtonVPN, from
the company behind the
privacy-centric ProtonMail,
is free and designed with
securi ty as its main focus.
It doesn’ t include ads orsell
your datato third parties
but, like most free VPN
tools, there are restrictions.
It limits the numberof
countries you can pretend
to be browsing from to just
thre e, throttles speeds and
only lets you run it on one
device. You get a seven-day
trial of th e paid-for version
with the free download.Warp
Cloudflare’s 1.1.1. 1
app for Android
and iOS (https://1.1.1.1) aims
to speed up and protect
your mobile browsing. It
works by routing your DNS
quer ies through its privacy-
focused resolver, which
should meanthat websites
load a little bit quicker.
1.1.1. 1 isn’t actually a VPN
in itself, but Cloudflare does
offer one – called Warp –
through the app. This
promises to secure and
optimise all your traffic.
However, there is one major
drawback with Warp at the
moment: it’s not available to
everyone. You have tosign
up to a waiting list – and it’s
a very long list. We’re
currently number1932244!
Nevertheless, when it
does finally start ro lling
out to everyone, its
pedigree – comingfrom
Cloudflare – means it
should be a
trustworthy
service that’s
worth using.4 FREE VPNs YOU CAN TRUSTThere maybeslow speed
issues
As we mentioned previously,
free VPNs are usually limited by various
restrictions. For example, there may be
a cap on the amount of tr affic you get
or the numberof countries your traffic
can be routed through. Most annoyingly,
though, the speed of free VPN
connections often gets throttled,
making downloads painfully slow and
causing streaming services, such as
Netflix and Hulu (which often don’t work
through free VPNs at the best of times)
to suffer from stuttering and buffering.
These limits are imposed to make you
want to upgrade to the paid-for version.They maynot protect all
traffic types
Some free browser-based
VPNs, such as those available asbrowser extensions and add-ons, only
secure your web traffic, so they don’t
provide any protection for tasks such as
peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing or VoIP
calling.
In some instances, using a VPNfor
these purposes may not even be
allowed under the terms and conditions.
Even if they are, the VPNprovider may
choose to throttle this type of tr affic,
making it inoperab le.Although we’d recommend paid-for VPNs over free versions every day of the we ek, we appreciate that not
everyone wants to spend money on a tool they may only use occasionally. Fortunately, there are some good free
VPNs we can recommend. They all have some limitations you should be aware of but they won’t co mpromise your
privacy or security.