Hotspot Shield is a well-known VPN service.Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. They are justly famous for playing a small part in the Arab Spring protests, and were once named the “World’s fastest VPN.” But things went down hill for a while, with the company being accused of unfair business practices and suffering a bug that leaked user data. Two years (and a few new owners) later, Hotspot Shield has had the opportunity to recover from those dark times. We’re here today to see how well Hotspot Shield has done putting their problems behind them. Do the apps still suffer leaks? Have they implemented privacy policies that are more protective of their user’s data? Can this VPN even be trusted with your private data? By the time you finish this article, you will know. Hotspot Shield is one of the older VPN services. Launched in 2008, the service gained fame for its use by dissidents during the Arab Spring protests in the early 2010s. Problems surfaced in 2016 when a team of academics cited Hotspot Shield in a research paper for using tracking libraries in their VPN service. One year later, in 2017, the Center for Democracy and Technology accused them of unfair and deceptive trade practices. In 2018, another researcher discovered a data leak. These adverse events caused many websites to stop recommending the service. The VPN got a fresh start in 2019 when it became part of the Pango family of products. Then, in July 2020, Pango (and Hotspot Shield) were acquired by a company called Aura. Given all that, this was an ideal time to take another look at Hotspot Shield. Free version of Hotspot Shield available.Connect 5 devices to Hotspot Shield simultaneously.Hotspot Shield and AnchorFree and Pango and Aura (background info).Based in the United States (a bad privacy jurisdiction).Does not work well for Netflix and streaming.Definitely not the “World’s Fastest VPN”.Possible IP address leaks on Android app.Here are the positives and negatives we found during our research and testing, along with some interesting facts about Hotspot Shield and its parent companies (we’ll try to explain the whole corporate tangle later). Hotspot Shield has millions of users around the world. That by itself tells you that they must have some great characteristics. Here are the pros that we discovered during our testing and research for this Hotspot Shield review. Continual upgrades to the Hotspot Shield VPN apps We are happy to report that the Hotspot Shield development team has been hard at work cranking out new apps and features. Recent improvements we noticed include the addition of a Linux client, as well as the addition of a kill switch and other features to the Android VPN client. They have also recently given you the option to use the OpenVPN protocol when you install Hotspot Shield on a router. However, they still do not support the WireGuard VPN protocol, which we have found to be much faster than OpenVPN. The Hotspot Shield app family now includes Windows, Mac OS, Linux, Android, and iOS. They also have an extension for the Chrome browser and instructions for how to use the service with some TVs and routers that support OpenVPN. No IP address or DNS leaks were found in our tests
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