While many VPN service providers would want you to believe that they have charitable aims in offering VPN access for free, the reality is that most free VPN services are glorified data farms.
Hotspot Shield, in particular, is a major culprit.
Hotspot Shield hijacks and redirects user traffic from top e-commerce websites to that of its affiliate partners and also uses more than five different third-party tracking libraries to enable it serve targeted ads to its users
Very few of the users know that Hotspot Shield intentionally allows third parties to gather data from users of their VPN service.
Here’s it straight from their privacy policy page: “Our ad partners may also receive information independently from you or your device.” Data Hotspot Shield’s “ad partners” are allowed to gather may include your device’s advertising ID, IMEI, MAC address, and wireless carrier information
HOLA - A team of researchers even set up a website to expose some of the flaws in Hola — including serving as an exit node and allowing code to be executed on computers using the Hola software
Betternet - Does this by allowing its advertisers the kind of access that makes it possible for them to gather data from devices of their users
VPN services have been set up solely for the purpose of acquiring and trading with user data. How else would you explain the fact that a big data company, Talking Data, is behind some of the popular VPN apps in the Google Play store including GO VPN and Eagle VPN
Those who do not gather these data directly give advertisers freewill to do it in order to deflect responsibility, but that is much worse. Even worse, some of the data gathered are transmitted over insecure data connections, compromising user privacy
https://www.hackread.com/almost-every-major-free-vpn-service-is-a-glorified-data-farm/
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