If you’re wanting to subscribe to a VPN, free or otherwise, browsing the web is probably one of, if not the main thing you want a VPN to protect. If you’re not wanting to use torrents and aren’t concerned about the internet usage of other apps being visible to your ISP, then one option you could explore is installing a free VPN extension in Chrome.
A traditional VPN is a standalone program that sets up an encrypted connection from your device to a VPN server and tunnels all internet traffic through to the VPN server. A browser-based VPN is an extension for your browser which creates a secure connection between your browser and the VPN server. The main difference is that it only protects data sent from your browser, rather than all communications from your computer.
There are plenty of free VPN extensions in the Chrome Web Store, but you should be very wary of all of them. Free VPNs, like almost any free product, have to make money somewhere, and this is generally done by selling user data to advertisers. In the case of a VPN, this means that the free VPN provider is now actively monitoring and selling all of your browsing data, this makes them even worse for your privacy than not using a VPN.
What you want to do is find a reputable VPN provider that offers a reasonable free tier.
Windscribe
Windscribe offers up to 15GB a month of data to its free users. You can install its free Chrome browser extension from the downloads page. You need to create and sign in with a free account to use the service.
To get the full 15GB a month, you need to confirm an email address associated with your account and take advantage of the “Tweet-4-Data” scheme.
Windscribe offers free access to servers in 10 countries around the world and can unblock Netflix and other streaming services.
To protect your connection to its VPN server, Windscribe’s Chrome extension uses TLS1.2 and the 128-bit variant of AES. On top of this, Windscribe has a strict no-logs policy.
Hide.me
Hide.me only offers 10GB a month of free data for its standalone VPN product, but in its Chrome extension, you get unlimited usage. You don’t even need to provide any details to use it, you just need to download it from the website.
Hide.me’s Chrome extension doesn’t encrypt your connection by default, to enable encryption you need to enable SOCKS in the proxy settings.
Three VPN server regions are available for users of the browser extension, Canada, the Netherlands, and Germany.
The Chrome extension can unblock Netflix and other streaming websites, it also protects you with Hide.me’s strict no-logs policy.
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