Are Free VPNs Illegal?

This page is part of the Proton VPN FAQ Hub.

Are free VPNs illegal anywhere in particular?

Are free VPNs illegal under UK, US or EU law? No, and there is no statute anywhere in those jurisdictions that distinguishes between paid and unpaid VPN services. The price tag is legally irrelevant. If using a VPN is legal where you live, you can lawfully use a free one, and if it is not, the free version is no safer a bet.

In the restricted countries the rules bite on the provider. China requires state approval for VPN services, Iran permits only licensed ones, and Myanmar’s Cybersecurity Law of 2025 attaches prison time and fines to unauthorised VPN provision. Free apps are caught by exactly the same licensing regimes, which is why they disappear from app stores in those markets. India offers a milder version of the same story: the 2022 CERT-In logging directive did not ban VPNs, but it made compliant operation unattractive enough that several providers withdrew and a number of apps quietly vanished from Indian app stores.

So why do people assume free VPNs must be illegal?

Three things feed the confusion. First, VPNs get mentioned in the same breath as piracy in most news coverage, so the association sticks. Second, free VPN apps really do get removed from app stores, which looks like enforcement even when it is a policy violation over undisclosed data collection. Third, the paid VPN industry has an obvious commercial interest in the word free sounding vaguely criminal, and its marketing copy leans on that.

Are free VPNs illegal because of any of that? No. It does mean you should read claims about them carefully, including claims from paid providers and including this page, since BAIZAAR earns a commission if you buy a subscription through us. Separate the question of what the law forbids from the question of what a given company is doing with your traffic. Those are genuinely different problems and only one of them has a court attached.

What is actually wrong with most free VPNs?

The real objection is economic. Running a VPN network is expensive, and if a service has no subscription revenue then the revenue is coming from somewhere you cannot see, which is the main reason to avoid free VPNs. That produces a predictable set of behaviours, most of which are legal in the UK, badly disclosed, and precisely the opposite of what you installed a VPN to achieve. Proton’s own assessment of whether free VPNs are safe lands in the same place, and it plainly has a commercial interest in landing there.

The recurring findings from security researchers and app store audits look like this:

• Bandwidth resale, where your connection is rented out as an exit node for other people’s traffic. This was the entire Hola business model until the 2015 scandal.
• Undisclosed ownership. A Tech Transparency Project analysis published in April 2025 found that more than 20 of the top 100 free VPNs on the US Apple App Store had concealed Chinese ownership, some tied to companies under US sanctions.
• Advertising injection and tracking SDKs bolted into the app, so the tool meant to reduce tracking adds to it.
• Encryption that does not work: hardcoded keys, outdated protocols, and in some audited cases no encryption on the tunnel at all.
• Excessive permissions on Android and iOS that have nothing to do with routing traffic.
• Data caps of a few hundred megabytes a month, throttled speeds and a free tier that functions as a trial rather than a product.

Can a free VPN actually get you into legal trouble?

Indirectly, yes, and this is the one genuine legal risk in the category. If a free app resells your idle bandwidth, your home IP address becomes the exit point for strangers. Whatever they do arrives at the other end wearing your address, and the first anyone knows about it is a letter from an ISP or worse. That is not a hypothetical: it is the specific design of several peer-to-peer free VPN products, disclosed in terms of service almost nobody reads.

The lesser risk is contractual. Using any VPN, free or paid, to get around a platform’s geographic restrictions or age checks may breach that platform’s terms, which can cost you the account even where no law has been broken. Treat this page as general information rather than legal advice, and if you are weighing up real exposure, ask a solicitor rather than a comparison site.

Is Proton VPN’s free tier a different proposition?

It is different in the way that matters, which is that it has an identifiable funding source. Proton’s free VPN is paid for by people who subscribe to the paid plans, so there is no ad network, no data broker and no bandwidth resale in the middle. The apps are open source and have been independently audited, and the no-logs policy is a published commitment rather than a slogan on a landing page.

Being honest about the limits: the free tier gives you one device, a small selection of countries and whatever speed is available at the time, and it is not built for streaming or heavy peer-to-peer use. That is the trade, and it is a reasonable one if your need is occasional. If you want the full server list, ten simultaneous devices and consistent speeds, upgrading to Proton VPN Plus is the point at which the product stops being a sample and starts being a tool.

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