VPNs?

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Does anyone use a VPN? How do you rate it? Are there good free ones available?

Not sure if my browser automatically has one ....Brave browser....not sure theirs is free or who might be free,Think Chrome might be free ?

I've got very little direct experience with them, but I'm interested in getting a good one eventually. Depends on what you want to do with it. Here's a summary of the pros and cons of some free VPNs:

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-free-vpns

One thing they don't go into is how well they manage to spoof the location, i.e. how difficult it is for a website to figure out that you're using a VPN. A good test might be to use it to try accessing BBC video content that's only available to people in the UK. The BBC seem to put a lot of energy into detecting VPN users etc., so if you can access their UK-only content, the spoofing is probably quite good.

They do look at security, which naturally they see as very important. There are crappy VPNs out there which ironically track you, which might well be the very thing you're trying to stop websites from doing.

I've been considering Proton, as I already use Proton email so it ought to be easy for me to set up, but I don't like that it only gives a choice of 3 different countries. I wouldn't be able to spoof the UK, which is a bit of a dealbreaker for me.

Here's a list of some of the VPN bad actors and crap peddlers to avoid:

https://www.cloudwards.net/worst-free-vpn/

It also gives some insights into the kind of criteria you might want to consider.

I've been using ExpressVPN for a while and I love it - well worth ~$9/month

This one lists Proton as the best free VPN

https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-fr ... st-overall

However, they don't seem to have a free version

https://protonvpn.com/l/special-pcmag-d ... an=vpn2024

Never mind. I found the free version.

https://protonvpn.com/free-vpn

I'm pretty sure the free Proton VPN is available, though I just tried to use it and found it a tad confusing to figure out how. They nag you a lot to buy it, but buttons marked "free" are there if you look for them. What confused me is that I was already logged into my free Proton Mail account, and when I selected VPN from there, they presented me with another login screen. I logged in with the same username and password as I use for the email account, which seemed to work, just that it was weird that I had to do that twice like that. It also wasn't clear whether I was then on the VPN or not. Presumably not, because I could see a button to download a program which I presume I'd have to run before I was actually using the VPN. I stopped at that stage.

But it does look possible to use it for free, and most people would probably find it easier than I did. I always get hung up on ambiguities and anomalies when most people just ignore them and plough on.

If you don't have a Proton email account, it seems you can still use Proton's free VPN:
https://protonvpn.com/free-vpn

I'm not sure which countries you get. I read somewhere that it was only 3, but according to the page I've linked to above, it's 6. I wish they'd make their minds up.

WARNING:
I once tried out a VPN, and noticed that it caused me 2 problems - Facebook and Hotmail were suspicious about how I'd suddenly changed country while still logged in. Facebook let me back in pretty easily but Hotmail were absolute bastards about it and made me jump through a lot of hoops before they let me into my email account again. Therefore my advice is, log out of Facebook and email (and anything else that's important) before using a VPN, and ideally, don't log back into them till the VPN session is finished.

I tried it, but they don't allow P2P on their free servers.

You mean they don't let you use a torrent program?

These guys reckon Windscribe is the best free VPN for torrenting:
https://www.top10vpn.com/best-vpn/free- ... windscribe
Trouble with all these things is that you can never be absolutely sure of privacy, and pretty much all reviewing sites have some kind of disclaimer saying you could still be vulnerable. I never know whether these disclaimers are just over-the-top back covering or not, so privacy remains rather a black box to me. I don't think anybody can ever be 100% certain their browsing is entirely private, whatever precautions they take.

That's right.

10 gb per month limit--that's like 3 or 4 movies.

Yes that's rather poor. Might be better to use streaming websites with a download manager, and choose something like 480p, if the free VPN allows such things. Still not great though. Looks like a case of the more you pays, the more you gets.

Oh well. Mostly I'm interested in foreign films or old movies, and they don't usually generate any trouble. Just the main American movie companies, like Universal, Paramount or Disney.

Torrenting is the main reason I started using a VPN. The one I've been using off & on for YEARS is called Private Internet Access. Various sources claim they do not keep logs & that it's been tested in court. The cost is very cheap if you sign up for a long term membership & pay upfront. I have a three year plan for a couple bux a month

I probably should stop, anyway, because I have enough movies to last several lifetimes. But, I probably won't.