Hundreds of free VPNs offer 'no real privacy at all,' researchers warn - does yours?

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. New research has revealed serious flaws in approximately 800 free VPNs that could compromise your device, security, and privacy. VPNs are crucial security tools that provide users with a layer of encryption and IP masking to keep data secure and to mitigate the risk of users being monitored online. However, VPN users place a lot of trust in these services -- and if the provider does not maintain strong security practices, it negates the point of using a VPN in the first place. Also: Best VPN services in 2025 There are only a few free VPNs around that seem to care about the security of their users and do not employ shady data collection practices or conduct malicious activities -- and this appears to now have backing from zLabs' latest research. Zimperium zLabs researchers published the results of a study that examined the security of roughly 800 free Virtual Private Network (VPN) services available in the Android and iOS ecosystems -- and the results are less than comforting. According to the team, many free VPN apps provide "no real privacy at all." zLabs researchers separated the security issues they uncovered into five categories. In total, 65.13% of the apps demonstrated issues in the first category, risky behaviours and APIs, which included some VPNs possessing the ability to take covert snapshots of user interfaces and insecure activity launches, which could lead to the app being forced into an insecure state, user i...