Dispelling Myths: Free VPNs Sell Your Data

Welcome to the first of a series on disproving myths associated with VPNs and how they work. To some users, a VPN is some kind of digital magic that we have no idea how it works, and a result of this lack of understanding, many types of myths and misconceptions have risen and taken hold in the market. In this series we’ll dispel these false notions and give you an inside look into the world of VPNs. To start off, we’ll discuss the rumor that a free VPN sells your data in order to make money.

A Few Bad Apples…

Let’s start off with some realism. Yes, there are free VPN providers who will unashamedly hoard your data and hand it over to advertising companies en masse to make a quick buck. This really is a thing that happens, and we’re ashamed that our competitors would discredit the industry by stooping to these levels. Everyone wants to make money, and with user data being the latest cash cow on the internet, it’s not surprising that a fly-by-night VPN company will pop up, start collecting data, sell it off, rebrand as a different company, and repeat the process. For a recent example of this, we need look no further than the complaint from the Center for Democracy & Technology about Hotspot Shield’s data collection practices.

How We Earn Our Users’ Trust

Hide.me takes the higher road when it comes to how we operate. Yes, we offer a free VPN package in addition to our paid options, but we don’t turn our free users into a revenue source by selling their data - In fact, through our No Logging policy, we don’t even collect data to sell in the first place. We’ve been in business since 2012, and we’re not looking to make a quick exit from the market by compromising our values.

What we also don’t do is insert obtrusive ads into your online browsing. While some of our competitors don’t sell user data, they do hinder the browsing experience by injecting ads into websites or having them pop up independently. While this is a legitimate business model, it undermines the quality of service to the user and is almost as bad as selling data outright. We don’t inject ads or hinder your browsing in any way.

So How Do Hide.me and Other Free VPNs Make Money?

This all sounds great, but the question at the end of the day is how your VPN provider makes money - After all, we’re not a charity and we have to pay the bills somehow.

Our chosen revenue model is to offer a paid service in addition to the free one. We do this through our Plus and Premium plans, and lots of other VPN providers do the same thing. We offer greater bandwidth (unlimited in the Premium package), more VPN nodes in more regions worldwide, and other features that make upgrading a good choice for you and us. The money from paid plans is the primary way that we offset the operating costs of supporting a free service so we don’t have to sell user data.