In January 2019, Hotspot Shield released its annual Transparency Report. Invasive jurisdictions like the US can compel supposedly privacy-focused companies like Aura to retain and share user information. These countries work together to collect, share, and analyze mass surveillance data – this alone is a red flag. It’s also one of the founding members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. But as of July 2020 it has been acquired by a security company called Aura.Īura is based in the US, which has very intrusive privacy laws. Until recently Hotspot Shield was owned by Pango, formerly known as AnchorFree. If you want a VPN that doesn’t log web activity, read our PIA VPN review. Combined with a worrisome past concerning user privacy, we can’t recommend the service for users seeking high-level anonymity online. This is unlikely to happen, but we would rather Hotspot Shield didn’t log this information for three years.Īt the very least, Hotspot Shield VPN monitors your IP address and website requests, even if in aggregate form.
As always, it’s best to stay away from ad-supported services when trying to stay private online.Ĭonnection timestamps could potentially be used – alongside other data points – to prove that you have visited a certain website.
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If you use the free version, you’ll also be sharing personally identifying information with advertisers. If you’re using Hotspot Shield Elite, the company monitors “ the nature of the requests that you make to our servers (such as what is being requested, information about the device and app used to make the request, timestamps, and referring URLs)” along with a whole host of other information.
While it’s encouraging that Hotspot Shield isn’t able to link any behavior to your specific account, this level of data collection is still far too invasive for any user concerned about privacy or anonymity. …Even if a government agency physically seizes one of our VPN servers and succeeds in breaking disk encryption on those servers, they would not find any logs or information that would reveal what any individual user was browsing, viewing, or doing online via a VPN connection.” If you’re looking for reassurance, the company states that: If you use Hotspot Shield Free, the service can also share even more data with third-party advertisers: Non-personal logs of websites (domain names, not specific URLs) visited via Hotspot Shield’s VPN servers – these are aggregated on a monthly basis.Device-specific information, such as device identifiers, browser types, device types and settings, operating system versions, mobile, wireless, and other network information (such as internet service provider name, carrier name and signal strength), and application version numbers.Bandwidth used per user, per session – used to monitor, support, and optimize VPN services, and stored for three years.Connection timestamps – used to monitor, support, and optimize VPN services, and stored for three years.Your approximate geographical location – derived from your IP address and used to connect you to the nearest VPN server.Your IP address – encrypted, only for the duration of your session, and not linked with your activity while using the VPN.While the VPN doesn’t keep any logs of your browsing history or online activity, it does collect plenty of other information and its privacy policy is often vague or misleading.Īccording to its terms and conditions, Hotspot Shield Elite collects the following data: Hotspot Shield has a questionable logging policy. The company does have a controversial past when it comes to user privacy, though.Īdditionally, there is no VPN kill switch in the macOS, Android, and iOS applications, which is a major security shortcoming for such a popular VPN. We can reveal that Hotspot Shield has the fastest connection speeds we’ve tested, thanks to Hydra VPN, its proprietary encryption protocol.įurthermore, all the provider’s apps are user-friendly and allow P2P and torrenting traffic on all servers.
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In this full Hotspot Shield review, we put the free and the premium VPN versions through our strict testing process to see how they performed for speed, security, streaming, and more.
Upgrading to the paid version removes ads and gives you unlimited bandwidth, access to servers in 80 countries, and a range of bundled security features. Hotspot Shield Free is an ad-sponsored VPN with a daily data limit of 500MB. With over 650 million customers, it’s one of the most popular VPN services in the world. Hotspot Shield offers two services: a free VPN and a premium VPN.
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