10
votes
Best free VPN provider for Android?
I was looking for a good, secure, free VPN provider app for Android. Are there any apps that fit this bill?
I was looking for a good, secure, free VPN provider app for Android. Are there any apps that fit this bill?
Sorry, but what everyone will tell you here is pretty much accurate...you won't find anything that satisfies these requirements.
Pretty much. It's a "pick two" kinda situation. You can get a good (as in performance), free VPN that sells your data and leaks. Or you can get a free, secure VPN that has very tight data restrictions and is slow.
It's worth coughing up a few bucks to get a good, secure and paid VPN, OP. Something like Nord or PIA. Failing that, ProtonVPN has a free tier and seem generally trustworthy, but I'd still approach with caution.
Is there an alternative to what I want? I just wanted to unblock websites at my school, but I wanted to hook it up through Tasker so it would automatically turn on when I connect to school WiFi.
I don't worry about blocking it. Everyone does it including IT and teachers.
If you have a Raspberry you can install an OpenVPN server with this script.
If it's free, your data is the product.
While typically true remember that just because you paid for a service doesn't gaurantee they aren't also selling your data.
This is also true!
I'm probably going to step on some toes here, but I feel the need to explain why a school might be doing this, and in what form it usually takes. My experience comes from running the security of a school (Preschool->Year 12) network (~ 10,000 devices).
For yourself, you probably see yourself blocked from social media, and entertainment sites, as well as a few others that you see no issue in accessing.
And for the majority of the time, there is no conflict with you accessing them outside of your classwork.
However, that isn't always the case.
There was a young girl, from a troubled background, in about Year 9. (And yes, this person existed. Details are obscured, but what played out... Occurred).
She began using a chatroom at the school, one which wasn't having enough activity to generate an alert for me, and one that wasn't on the usual list of blocks.
There, she connected with an older fellow, who made her laugh.
They eventually arranged to meet and have sex.
Thankfully, that's when I noticed it, and managed to block a 15yro girl from being taken in by a 70+yro male who had no intentions of ever allowing her to leave his house once she entered it.
Police intervention.
Yay. So... What does this have to do with blocks? I don't believe I could have noticed it earlier. Why does a school need to block everyone to stop a rare occurrence?
... Because the law says so.
As the school had taken no action, the law takes the opinion that our resources were therefore used in the crime itself. The law requires we protect every student, even if that student is trying to get themselves hurt by bypassing our systems.
Bypassing our systems is also considered a juvenile crime, at least in my jurisdiction.
... You may just be doing this because you want to chat with friends or watch a video.
But the school is required by the full might of law to stop you.
I actually use it to bypass the screwed up filter list. Most of the time it blocks things that are education related because it thinks it's not.
Indeed. And screwed-up lists because of unforgiving laws. I wasn't saying that you would undertake anything wrong. Just trying to explain the other side of the story.
I understand that. Thank you (:
Thanks, you're certainly more understanding than the students I had.
Free, no. You can do well for 5 Euro/mo.
Really surprised no one's mentioned ProtonVPN. It's free, performs very well, has no data caps, and has an excellent reputation of being private (afaik), so it sounds like it'd be perfect for you OP :)
Only limitation is that they restrict you to servers in one of three countries; USA, Japan, or Netherlands, but Netherlands has a good reputation for privacy.
Also, they block torrenting on the free tier.
As everyone has said, most free VPN's sell your data and do other things.
If you want a good VPN, Google-made open source VPN server/client called Outline is easy to setup. Basically you run the server on a Windows/Linux/Mac computer on your home network, then run the client on the laptop you want to bypass blocks with.
There's also the good ol Google translate trick, where you can use GT as a proxy
Lol. Those poor second language teachers who use Google translate for student questions.
If you've got the technical chops to set it up, you can build a VPN with Zerotier. https://zerotier.com
I use it to connect to my home network from my phone, and it punches through almost any firewall.
It's a lot easier to spin up your own VPN on Amazon's free tier of AWS! If you're a student you get $300 in free AWS credits as well.
Algo is by far my favorite choice. They're arguably the most secure VPN out there, and you get full control over your box and network. They're not a traditional VPN - they are basically a script that sets up a server out there and configures it to be a tightly controlled VPN, and then give you all the creds/keys to set it up. All done locally/on the server!
Azire is currently offering their services for free for testing out the new wireguard protocol.