Is a free VPN worth using? Here's why it could be risky

There's a familiar adage in tech: "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." Free VPNs are a textbook case. When a company has to cover server costs, bandwidth, and engineering salaries without charging users, it needs another revenue stream—and your browsing history, device metadata, and idle bandwidth are the most liquid assets it has. The Engadget article (https://www.engadget.com/2252776/is-free-vpn-worth-using-risks-explained/) does a solid job of laying out the concrete ways that plays out, from selling logs to injecting ads into your sessions. But the deeper issue is the illusion of security. A free VPN can make you feel encrypted when you're actually just shifting your trust from your ISP to an unknown third party with no contractual obligation to protect you. Many free apps are missing modern protocols like WireGuard, use outdated ciphers, or simply leak DNS requests. That's not privacy—it's a false sense of it. The article rightly points out that some free tiers from reputable paid services are acceptable, but those are the exception, not the rule. This is also a question of incentives. A paid VPN has a reason to keep you happy and secure: you're the customer. A free VPN's real customer is the data buyer or the ad network. The product is you. So when evaluating any free tool, the analytical move is to ask not "what do I get?" but "what do they get?" If the answer isn't obvious and reassuring, that's a red flag. None of this means all free VPNs are malicious—some are funded by grants or run by privacy advocates. But the burden of proof is on the provider, and the article's cautious tone is appropriate. For most users, the safest choice is either a reputable paid service or simply a good browser extension that handles HTTPS, rather than routing your whole connection through an unknown server.