Best and Free VPN

Do you have an actual need for a VPN? Unless this is a requirement for a business or school to encrypt data between yourself and a VPN they control, you're not increasing your online privacy, you're lowering it.

Public VPN's are anything but private.

A VPN can do absolutely nothing to hide any data going between you and the site you're viewing since only half of the communication is encrypted. Anything going to the site from the VPN and back to it is in the clear, or the site you're accessing would have no idea what to do with the encrypted data.

A VPN has only two uses:

1. You're using it to send and receive content from a truly tunneled VPN at your place of employment. Only the servers at the office get the unencrypted data from you as output from the VPN. Anything coming back to you is encrypted. Meaning, anyone trying to capture data between you and the office will only ever see encrypted data. A hacker would have to somehow breach the business' server on the clear input/output side, or your end to get anything.

2. You're trying to hide yourself. Since a VPN encrypts what's coming back to you, it does a good job at hiding what IP address the data is going back to (and as the link mentions, even this doesn't do a good job of hiding you anymore). However, any and all VPN's log this data. If you do anything illegal and law enforcement tracks the clear data back to the VPN (and they can), they'll demand log data to see what IP address the data was output to. The site running the VPN will give you up. They aren't going to go to jail for what you do.

Free VPNs sell your data.

This isn't exactly breaking news. It's been known for a very long time that free VPN's (in particular) log and sell your data. How else do you think they pay for their servers?

It's the same model as Google, and in particular, Chrome. You are the product. Chrome runs a background daemon from the moment you turn your computer on, whether Chrome itself is running or not. Its job is to constantly send anonymized data back to Google about your web and personal computer usage.

NordVPN is supposedly one of the better offerings. But it's still mostly useless. No matter what web site you're communicating with, only what you send to the VPN and it sends back to you is encrypted. Every bit of data out of the VPN to the site you're visiting, and from there back to the VPN is the same as using no VPN at all. It has to be, or the sites you're visiting would just get a load of encrypted data they can't do anything with.

VPN reviews you find online are also almost completely untrustworthy:

Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites

and to add to P. Phillips' good advice, you should consider that Public VPN's are anything but private.

and if you want it to spoof your location, I personally use Urban VPN Desktop. (free in the App Store) and I always make sure to disable it when not needed. it drastically slows your internet speed.

but before attempting that, you need to check your federal, provincial, state, and / or local laws. what is legal for me to do up here in Canada may or may not be legal in your location.

Welcome and thank you too 🇨🇦

One last work on ALL the very good advise already posted.

VPNs, some but not all, have been Known to Collect the Users Data ( Info ) including your credit card info one has used to purchase their Service

As it is a Business like another business, data is sometimes Sold to Third Parties for $$

That really can help the VPNs Botton-Line to the Share Holder

EDITED

All the " Percipients " in this question of your

" Team " effort

" Many Hands makes the work Lighter "

The concept of Team may seem foreign to some but works better than pulling the cart alone IMHO

jeffreythefrog

AlWeir

Kurt Lang

Your truly P. Phillips

Short answer - None.

Not unless, the User is work Off Site from your Employer ( which you are not ) or connecting to your Financial Institutions.

Free VPNs = you get what you pay for IMHO

A good VPN is worth it's weight in salt. With a free VPN and there are numerous ones on the App store are just that, "Free". You are getting what you are not paying for.

and Kurt Lang's advice is good also.

Welcome on behave of the " Collective " of Contributors