Free VPN by FreeVPN.org Review

The FreeVPN.org website comes nowhere near the kind of transparency you need in a trustworthy VPN service.

There is no about or team page and the social media buttons don’t go anywhere.

We wanted to find out who is really behind FreeVPN.org.

It certainly isn’t the group of happy young people displayed on the website – they are easily identifiable as the stars of a royalty-free stock photo titled: “Group of happiness students with raised hands.”

There is an address on the website: 1070 Gray Fox Circle, Pleasanton, California 94566. This just points to a detached house in a Californian suburb, though.

A reverse search for the domain provides more information. FreeVPN.org is hosted on the same server as just 11 other sites, including dashvpn.io and open-vpn.org.

Some of the domains hosted on this server, like freedomvpn.org, redirect to the FreeVPN.org site.

Several of these pages, including DashVPN, point to the same Pleasanton address, too. It is safe to say that they belong to the same individual or organization.

After some investigation, it’s apparent all these companies exist beneath ActMobile Networks Inc., fronted by president Matt Snyder, CFO Tim Bush, and CTO Pankaj Kulkarni.

A more elusive figure is Andrew Foss. ActMobile.com is registered under his name, and he is listed as CEO on an archived version of its website, but we can’t find any record at all of him online.

Matt Snyder’s LinkedIn account describes ActMobile as producing “consumer-facing apps… under the FreeVPN.org umbrella”:

ActMobile is unambiguously the parent company of FreeVPN.org.

The company is incorporated in the United States, which is a privacy red flag. Revelations in recent years show the US as one of the most privacy hostile countries in the world.

If you can trust your VPN service not to keep logs, jurisdiction isn’t necessarily a big deal. As we have just seen, though, FreeVPN.org isn’t very transparent.

Dubious Security Standards

We also have some doubts about how seriously it takes data security.

Currently, the URL Freevpn.org doesn’t redirect to HTTPS by default, leaving users without HTTPS Everywhere to the HTTP version of the site.

This is insecure, dangerous, and frankly not something we expect to see from a VPN service in 2023.

The question is raised: if its website isn’t secure, how can you trust FreeVPN.org’s VPN with your data?

Back in 2016, FreeVPN.org had a comprehensive and well written (if invasive) privacy policy.

But, bit by bit, it has swapped comprehensiveness out for short, crowd-pleasing declarations.

In big letters at the top of the page there is a question and answer:

“What Information Do We Collect?

“None.”

The mobile app also includes an information tab with an encouraging statement:

On their face, these changes all seem positive. Not keeping data is surely good, isn’t it?

But it isn’t that simple. Lots of VPN providers will claim not to log – but investigation often reveals they have a very loose definition of what logs actually are.

A privacy policy can promise lots, but you need to be able to trust it, otherwise it is meaningless.

We hoped that this privacy policy rewrite meant that FreeVPN.org was making its service more secure and trustworthy.

Instead, FreeVPN.org is only getting less transparent – it seems to care more about making money than being honest about user privacy.

For instance, the privacy policy states:

• It does not use cookies
• It does not collect or share any information about its users
• It has advertising partners but doesn’t share any information with them

iOS and Android apps generally do not accept cookies in the same way as a computer browser would – advertisers have other methods of tracking your activity.

On the website FreeVPN.org give instructions for deleting your personal data – but we found no way to do so in the app.

The suggestion of the existence of a personal profile is worrying on its own – as it suggests that FreeVPN.org is logging something about its users.

November 2021 Data Leak

On November 1st 2021, a database containing 300 million records of VPN user data was posted to an online hacker forum. It is claimed this database belongs to ActMobile, the parent company of FreeVPN.org.

As we discussed above, FreeVPN.org claims to retain no user data. But the leaked database contains every user’s full name, IP address, and password. This appears to confirm our skepticism about the VPN’s vague logging policy.

In response, ActMobile has stated that the accusation is false, as they “do not maintain databases”.

Despite its denial, the evidence strongly suggests that the leaked database belongs to ActMobile. Thus proving FreeVPN.org logs personally-identifiable user data, despite its claims to the contrary.

We strongly recommend avoiding FreeVPN by FreeVPN.org under all circumstances.

We don’t expect the best speeds from free VPNs – within reason. A VPN still needs to hit some basic levels of performance in order to function properly.

While FreeVPN.org certainly isn’t the slowest VPN we’ve ever reviewed, it consistently underperforms.

FreeVPN.org’s latency was poor across the board. On a London to London short-distance connection, we recorded a ping of 16ms. Our worst connection was to Hong Kong, which reached 240ms.

Again, we’ve seen higher pings than this, but it pretty much eliminates the option of playing online mobile games while connected.

The speeds achieved by FreeVPN.org scale pretty directly with distance, so we don’t think they are being throttled, just that they are not set up to effectively serve the volume of traffic passing through them.

These are the speeds we saw world-wide:

• USA: 4.5Mbps (download) & 13.2Mbps (upload)
• Germany: 29Mbps (download) & 30.9Mbps (upload)
• Hong Kong: 6.6Mbps (download) & 11.9Mbps (upload)

Nearby connections aren’t great but global ones slow down to a crawl. Even if we thought FreeVPN.org were a trustworthy organization, speeds like these would make its service difficult to recommend.

It’s safe to say there are much faster free VPNs than FreeVPN.org available. For instance, in our TunnelBear speed tests, the free VPN recorded a speed loss of less than 8%.

The app features no advanced security features, not even a kill switch. These kinds of tools are vital to keeping your data safe from governments and hackers, but completely absent from FreeVPN.org’s VPN service.

We’d like to talk a little about about the VPN protocol and encryption being used – but neither the website or the app disclose anything about these, though.

There also aren’t any settings which allow you to change protocol.

Since FreeVPN.org doesn’t monitor its email we weren’t able to find anything out from the company directly, either.

Our research has found that FreeVPN.org uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2, the second most up-to-date version of the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) VPN protocol.

This is the same protocol as Microsoft uses for its corporate networking, and can be considered generally secure.

That said, it is not the most recent version of the protocol, or the most secure. TLS 1.3 has performance improvements over 1.2, while also reducing the risk of successful attacks.

The app only allows you access to the VPN for fixed amounts of time, and this results in a significant security flaw. Once your time has run out the VPN connection simply cuts out without warning, completely exposing your data.

As we have already mentioned, when we visited FreeVPN.org it didn’t automatically redirect us to the HTTPS version of the site. This is insecure and exposes any visitors to potential Man-in-the-Middle attacks.

(If you do visit the site, make sure there is a padlock in the URL bar to show you have a HTTPS connection. If the padlock is open or crossed out, make sure to add https:// before the URL to connect to the secure version of the site).

This security flaw applies only to the website, not to the VPN itself, but it doesn’t give us any faith that FreeVPN.org is up to the task of securing a global network of VPN traffic.

With all that said: we found no DNS or IP leaks, which is a positive sign.

Some more transparency around this would do a lot to boost our faith in this VPN provider.

FreeVPN.org can’t unblock US Netflix, or any other region for that matter. But, this is very common among free VPNs, with only two free VPNs that stream US Netflix, currently.

Surprisingly, FreeVPN.org can unblock BBC iPlayer, though. But, the very slow speeds make the streaming experience almost unbearable.

In short, FreeVPN.org is not a streaming VPN we can recommend. Conversely, our tests found that Windscribe can unblock both Netflix in a number of locations including Turkey, France, and Germany, as well as BBC iPlayer on its free servers.

FreeVPN.org doesn’t have an official policy on torrenting anywhere on its website or in the app. We reached out for information on it but haven’t received a reply.

In our tests we’ve found P2P traffic is permitted on its servers, but we do not recommend using this VPN for torrenting.

There are a few reasons for this:

• The terrible speeds available from Free VPN by FreeVPN.org will make torrenting slow and frustrating
• FreeVPN.org’s US jurisdiction is notoriously hostile to torrenting
• The VPN company has a vague and poorly written logging policy which we do not trust

When downloading torrents it’s vital you use a trustworthy VPN. Luckily, we found a handful of free VPNs suitable for secure torrenting.

We’ve seen little evidence that Free VPN by FreeVPN.org will work is censored regions, although when we spoke to the app’s developers they claimed to have users in China.

Only very well designed VPNs with dedicated obfuscation technology can work in censored regions – you might want to give FreeVPN.org a try in censored regions, but we wouldn’t count on it working.

If you need a VPN for a censored region do yourself a favour and get a better one – take a look at our best VPNs for China, the UAE or Turkey to get an idea of the options available.

FreeVPN.org doesn’t have particularly good customer service.

Most free VPNs at least have a guide section, or a blog which can give its users some help, but when you click the “Blog” link on the FreeVPN.org website it just refreshes the page – no help to be found.

In fact, FreeVPN.org appears to be made up of just three pages: the homepage, a privacy policy, and a download page for a .apk of the app.

None of the social media buttons actually lead to social media profiles, either.

Without online resources the only option users are left with is to email a support email (support@freevpn.org).

We tried doing just this, but got no reply.

FreeVPN.org has informed us that it monitors customer service questions that come from the app itself, not the email listed on its site.