The Truth About Free VPNs: Privacy Risks You Should Know

I'm going to be blunt with you: most free VPNs are surveillance tools dressed up as privacy products. That's not exaggeration. It's not paranoia. It's what the data keeps showing, over and over, every time some researcher actually bothers to crack open these apps and look at what they're doing under the hood. And it drives me up the wall that millions of people in India — people who downloaded a VPN specifically because they wanted more privacy — are getting the exact opposite of what they signed up for.

Let me back up a second. In early 2025, a team at a European university published an analysis of 283 free VPN apps available on the Google Play Store. Of those, roughly 72% embedded at least one third-party tracking library. About 38% contained what the researchers classified as malware-adjacent code — stuff that could inject ads, redirect your traffic, or skim data from your device. These aren't obscure apps nobody uses. Some had tens of millions of downloads. Plenty of them had 4+ star ratings because, well, the VPN "worked" in the sense that it changed your IP address. People just didn't realize what else it was doing.

So here's the thing that probably nobody explains when you're searching "best free VPN India" on Google at midnight. A VPN is a pipe. Your internet traffic goes in one end, encrypted (hopefully), and comes out the other end at the VPN provider's server. That means the provider can see everything. Every website you visit. Every search you make. Every unencrypted connection you open. When your ISP was the one watching, at least they were a regulated telecom company operating under TRAI rules. When a random free VPN app is watching? There's often no regulation, no accountability, and no real identity behind the company at all.

The Business Model Nobody Wants to Talk About

Running VPN servers costs money. Real money. You need infrastructure in multiple countries, you need bandwidth — and bandwidth is expensive — you need engineers, you need security audits if you're doing things properly. A paid VPN charges you, say, 250 to 700 rupees a month. That's the honest trade: you pay them, they protect your traffic, nobody else gets your data. Simple.

Free VPNs don't charge you. So where's the money coming from? There are really only a few possibilities, and none of them are good for you.

The most common model is data harvesting. The VPN provider logs your browsing activity — sometimes everything, sometimes just the "metadata" like which domains you visit and when — and sells that to advertising networks, data brokers, or analytics firms. A user profile built from VPN traffic is actually more valuable than a regular browsing profile because it captures traffic from every app on your device, not just your browser. Think about that for a second. Your banking app, your messaging app, your health app — all that traffic routes through the VPN. If the provider is logging, they've got a view into your life that even your ISP didn't have.

The second model is ad injection. Some free VPNs modify the web pages you visit, inserting their own ads or swapping out existing affiliate links with their own. You're browsing Flipkart, and the VPN is silently rewriting links so they earn a commission on your purchases. I've tested a couple of these myself — you can catch them by comparing page source code with and without the VPN active. It's blatant once you know what to look for.

Then there's the outright malicious category. A few free VPN apps have been caught installing cryptocurrency miners on users' phones. Others have been traced back to companies that are, let's say, closely affiliated with data collection operations in countries not exactly known for respecting privacy. One investigation in 2024 found that a VPN app with over 10 million downloads in India was routing a portion of user traffic through residential proxies, essentially selling your bandwidth so other people could use your internet connection. Your IP address showing up in someone else's activity. That's terrifying if you think about it.

Specific Names That Should Worry You

I'm not going to list every bad actor — there are too many, and new ones appear every month. But some patterns are worth pointing out. Hola VPN, which was hugely popular a few years back, openly operated a peer-to-peer network where free users' bandwidth was sold to paying customers through their Luminati (now Bright Data) service. Your home IP could be used for anything — web scraping, ad fraud, who knows what else.

SuperVPN, which had over 100 million downloads on the Play Store at one point, suffered a massive data leak in 2023 that exposed 360 million user records. Names, email addresses, IP addresses, geolocation data, servers visited — all of it dumped online. The company behind it was almost impossible to identify. No real address, no clear jurisdiction, no response to security researchers who tried to alert them before the leak went public.

VPN Master, another popular choice in India, was found by a CSIRO study to contain malware and to be one of the most tracking-heavy VPN apps in existence. Yet it maintained strong ratings because the average user simply couldn't tell anything was wrong. The connection seemed to work. Websites loaded. That was good enough.

These aren't isolated cases. They represent the norm for free VPNs. The exceptions — the ones that are actually safe — are rare enough that I can probably count them on one hand.

What Free VPNs Actually See (and What Leaks Anyway)

Let's say you install a free VPN and connect. Here's what the provider can theoretically access. All your DNS queries — meaning every domain name your device looks up. The IP addresses of every server you connect to. The timing and volume of your traffic, which can reveal patterns even if the content is encrypted. If you visit any site over plain HTTP (no HTTPS), the provider sees the full content of those pages. And through traffic analysis, even encrypted HTTPS sessions can reveal what you're doing to a motivated observer. Watching a Netflix video looks different from sending email, which looks different from browsing Twitter. The patterns are distinct.

But here's what makes it worse: many free VPNs don't even encrypt your traffic properly. Some use PPTP, a protocol from the 1990s that's been broken for over a decade. Others implement OpenVPN or WireGuard incorrectly, with misconfigured settings that leave gaps. A few — and this still blows my mind — don't encrypt at all. They just proxy your traffic through their server, changing your IP address but leaving everything in plain text. You think you're protected. You're actually less safe than you were before, because now there's an extra party watching your unencrypted traffic.

DNS leaks are another plague. Even when the VPN tunnel is working, your DNS requests might still go to your ISP's resolver instead of the VPN's. That means your ISP can see every domain you visit despite the VPN being active. WebRTC leaks — a browser-specific issue — can similarly expose your real IP address. I tested six popular free VPN apps available in India back in late 2025. Four of them leaked DNS queries. Two leaked my real IP through WebRTC. Only one actually passed a full leak test, and that one had a different problem: it was logging connection data.

The Logging Problem

"No-log policy" has become the most abused phrase in the VPN industry. Nearly every free VPN claims it. Almost none of them mean it. The problem is that "logs" can mean different things. Connection logs track when you connected and disconnected, your IP address, and the server you used. Activity logs track what you actually did — websites visited, files downloaded, searches made. A company can technically say "no activity logs" while still keeping detailed connection logs, which are enough to identify you and correlate your traffic.

Paid VPN providers like Mullvad, IVPN, and ProtonVPN have submitted to independent audits where third-party security firms verify their no-log claims. They've had servers seized by authorities in some cases, and the seizures confirmed that no user data was stored. Free VPNs? I haven't seen a single free-only VPN provider undergo a credible independent audit. Not one. Maybe I've missed something, but I don't think so.

There was a case in 2020 where seven Hong Kong-based free VPN providers — all claiming zero logs — were found to have a shared database containing 1.2 terabytes of user logs. Connection timestamps, session data, IP addresses, device information, even some browsing data. Over a billion records. These companies all had separate branding and separate Play Store listings, but they shared infrastructure and, evidently, shared a very generous definition of "no logs."

The Handful of Free Tiers That Are Probably Fine

I want to be fair here. Not every free VPN option is a privacy nightmare. There are a few where the free tier is genuinely safe — because it's subsidized by paying customers and exists mainly as a marketing strategy to convert free users into paid subscribers. The difference is that these companies make their actual money from subscriptions, not from your data.

ProtonVPN's free tier is probably the safest free option available right now. Proton is based in Switzerland, has gone through multiple independent audits, open-sources their apps, and funds the free tier entirely through revenue from paid users. The free tier has limitations — you get servers in only five countries, speeds are capped, and you can only connect one device. But the privacy protections are identical to the paid plan. No ads, no tracking, no data selling. They've got a solid track record and a genuine institutional commitment to privacy, being connected to CERN and all.

Windscribe's free tier gives you 10 GB per month across servers in about ten countries. The company is based in Canada, publishes transparency reports, and has a reasonable privacy policy. It's not as thoroughly audited as Proton, but they've been consistent and haven't had any scandals. Ten gigs won't cover heavy use, though. That's maybe enough for occasional browsing and checking email on public Wi-Fi.

Beyond those two, I'd be cautious. Some people mention hide.me's free tier, which is okay-ish but limited to one server location and 10 GB. The trust level isn't quite where Proton or Windscribe are, at least not yet. Atlas VPN used to be recommended but was acquired by Nord Security, and the free product has changed enough that I'm not confident making the recommendation anymore.

What It Actually Costs to Not Get Screwed

A good paid VPN runs you roughly 250 to 400 rupees per month if you pay annually. Mullvad is a flat 5 euros (about 460 rupees) per month with no annual discount, but they accept cash in an envelope — literally — and don't even need your email address. ProtonVPN's paid plans start around 350 rupees monthly on a two-year term. IVPN is similar.

Compare that to what you're risking with a free VPN. Your browsing history sold to advertisers. Your real IP exposed through leaks. Possible malware on your device. Your bandwidth resold to strangers. If your data is used in an identity theft situation or fraud, the costs could run into lakhs. The math isn't even close.

For Indian users specifically, there's another angle. The Indian government has periodically ordered VPN providers to maintain user logs under CERT-In's 2022 directive. Several reputable VPN companies responded by removing their physical servers from India and offering virtual Indian server locations from abroad. If you're using a free VPN that still operates physical servers in India, those servers are probably complying with the logging directive. Your "private" traffic is being logged because the law requires it. Paid providers who pulled their servers out of India did so precisely to avoid this. Free providers? They probably just quietly started logging and didn't tell you.

How to Test If Your VPN Is Leaking

If you're currently using a free VPN and you're not ready to switch, at least test it. Visit ipleak.net with the VPN connected. Your real IP address should not appear anywhere on the page. Run the DNS leak test there — you should see only the VPN provider's DNS servers, not your ISP's (Jio, Airtel, BSNL, whatever). Check the WebRTC section too. If your real IP shows up under WebRTC, your browser is leaking your identity despite the VPN.

Another test: visit browserleaks.com and go through their full suite. Pay attention to the Canvas fingerprinting section and the WebGL section. Some free VPNs don't protect against fingerprinting at all, meaning websites can still uniquely identify your browser even if your IP is masked.

Run these tests on multiple servers if your VPN offers choices. A VPN might pass leak tests on one server and fail on another. It's inconsistent, especially with free services that don't invest heavily in server configuration.

A Note About CERT-In's 2022 Directive

I should mention this because it specifically affects anyone using a VPN in India. In April 2022, CERT-In (the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team) issued a directive requiring VPN providers operating in India to store user logs for five years. That includes your real name, IP address, email, the specific reason you're using a VPN (yes, really), and your "ownership pattern." The directive was widely criticized by privacy advocates and the tech industry. Several major VPN providers — ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, ProtonVPN — responded by pulling their physical servers out of India entirely. They now offer "virtual" Indian server locations hosted in Singapore or the Netherlands, which provide an Indian IP address without the data actually passing through servers on Indian soil.

Free VPN providers, by and large, didn't make that move. The ones that still operate physical servers in India are presumably complying with the directive, which means they're logging everything. Even the ones that claim "no logs" on their marketing pages. Because CERT-In's directive is a legal requirement, and violating it carries penalties. So if you're using a free VPN with servers physically located in India, your connection logs are being stored by the provider for half a decade. That's a particularly bitter irony for someone who installed the VPN to avoid being tracked.

The Part Where I Get Sidetracked

You know what really gets to me? The Play Store and App Store both have editorial sections recommending "top free VPN apps." Apple and Google are the gatekeepers. They take 30% of in-app purchases. They run their own ad networks. And they're platforming apps that are essentially spyware. Google removed a batch of malicious VPN apps in 2024 after researchers flagged them, but dozens of similar apps popped right back up under slightly different names. The whack-a-mole approach doesn't work when there's this much money in data harvesting.

I keep thinking about the incentive structures here. The user wants privacy. The VPN claims to provide privacy. The app store lists the VPN under "privacy tools." But the VPN's actual business depends on violating the user's privacy, and the app store's actual business depends on the advertising data that the VPN is quietly funneling into the ecosystem. Everyone's incentives are misaligned except the user's, and the user is the one with the least information and the least power. It's a situation that probably won't fix itself without regulation, and India's DPDP Act, for all its ambitions, doesn't specifically address VPN provider conduct. Maybe the rules under the Act will eventually cover it. Maybe CERT-In's approach will evolve. For now, your best protection is being skeptical, testing everything, and accepting that the few hundred rupees a month for a paid VPN is one of the cheapest forms of insurance you'll ever buy. Or, you know, just use Proton's free tier and call it a day. That's what I tell my family members, anyway, right before I start explaining DNS leaks and they stop listening...