Technologies
Best Free VPNs 2022: Our Experts Show You How to Avoid Shady Services and Get Premium Protection
Care enough about your privacy to avoid the malware, ad tracking and slow connections that come with free VPN options.

A free and well-tested virtual private network for your computer and other devices is hard to find. Even the best free VPNs usually limit the amount of data you can use, and may not be as fast as premium services. But when you’re browsing on a budget and want to avoid shady free services that could be loaded with malware, there are a few solid VPN providers that stand up to our rigorous testing.
The idea of using a 100% free VPN might be tempting, especially if you’re on a tight budget and don’t want to cough up the cash for a monthly or yearly subscription fee. But as frequent security issues prove, using even the best free VPN comes with risks. That’s why it’s safer to make use of the free trials or introductory versions available from our list of trusted VPN providers.
Yes, you read that right: If you absolutely must use a free VPN service, your safest bet is to test-drive a free trial or take advantage of a money-back guarantee on a trusted paid VPN service. When choosing a VPN service, quality and your online safety should always come before cost. It’s not worth it to settle for an unsafe free VPN just to save a few bucks every month. With that in mind, all of our top recommended VPN services offer either a free version of the paid service or a 30-day assessment period. Here are the best contenders we’ve found:
- NordVPN offers a risk-free 30-day trial period. It’s one of the best free VPN services to use for 30 days.
- ExpressVPN is our current Editors’ Choice VPN. While it doesn’t have a standard trial period, it does offer a 30-day money-back guarantee. It also currently has an offer for three months free with a one-year plan, or 15 months for the price of 12. However, there’s an exception: If you sign up for ExpressVPN by downloading the app on an Android or iOS device, you’ll be offered a seven-day free trial. But this only works in certain countries, including the US.
- If ExpressVPN isn’t in your budget, check out Surfshark’s $2.30 a month offer on its two-year plan.
- ProtonVPN offers a limited free version of its service (one device only, limited download speeds) as a way of giving people a free test drive of the product. It’s the one narrow exception to the «avoid free VPNs» rule (see below).
Free VPN FAQs
5 reasons why you should never use a free VPN
1. Free VPNs simply aren’t as safe
Free VPNs can be very dangerous. Why? Because to maintain the hardware and expertise needed for large networks and secure users, VPN services have expensive bills to pay. As a VPN customer, you either pay for a premium VPN service with your dollars or you pay for free services with your data. If you aren’t ordering at the table, you’re on the menu.
Some 86% of free iOS and Android VPN apps — accounting for millions of installs — have unacceptable privacy policies, ranging from a simple lack of transparency to explicitly sharing user data with Chinese authorities, according to two independent 2018 investigations into free VPN apps from Top10VPN. Another 64% of free VPN app offerings had no web presence outside of their app store pages, and only 17% responded to customer support emails.
In June 2019, Apple reportedly brought the hammer down on apps that share user data with third parties. But 80% of the top 20 free VPN apps in Apple’s App Store appear to be breaking those rules, according to a June update on the Top10VPN investigation.
Also in June last year, 77% of apps were flagged as potentially unsafe in the Top10VPN VPN Ownership Investigation — and 90% of those flagged as potentially unsafe in the Free VPN Risk Index — still posed a risk.
«Google Play downloads of apps we flagged as potentially unsafe have soared to 214 million in total, rocketing by 85% in six months,» the report reads. «Monthly installs from the App Store held steady at around 3.8 million, which represents a relative increase as this total was generated by 20% fewer apps than at the start of the year as a number of apps are no longer available.»
On Android, 214 million downloads represent a lot of user login data, culled from unwitting volunteers. And what’s one of the most profitable things one can do with large swaths of user login data?
2. You can catch malware
Let’s get this out of the way right now: 38% of free Android VPNs contain malware — despite the security features on offer, a CSIRO study found. And yes, many of those free VPNs were highly rated apps with millions of downloads. If you’re a free user, your odds of catching a nasty bug are greater than 1 in 3.
So ask yourself which costs less: a secure VPN service for about $100 a year, or hiring an identity theft recovery firm after some chump steals your bank account login and Social Security number?
But it couldn’t happen to you, right? Wrong. Mobile ransomware attacks are skyrocketing. Symantec detected more than 18 million mobile malware instances in 2018 alone, constituting a 54% year-over-year increase in variants. And in 2019, Kaspersky noted a 60% spike in password-stealing Trojans.
But malware isn’t the only way to make money if you’re running a free VPN service. There’s an even easier way.
3. The ad-valanche
Aggressive advertising practices from a free plan can go beyond getting hit with a few annoying pop-ups and quickly veer into dangerous territory. Some VPNs sneak ad-serving trackers through the loopholes in your browser’s media-reading features, which then stay on your digital trail like a prison warden in a B-grade remake of Escape from Alcatraz.
HotSpot Shield VPN earned some painful notoriety for such allegations in 2017, when it was hit with a Federal Trade Commission complaint (PDF) for over-the-top privacy violations in serving ads. Carnegie Mellon University researchers found the company not only had a baked-in backdoor used to secretly sell data to third-party advertising networks, but it also employed five different tracking libraries and actually redirected user traffic to secret servers.
When the story broke, HotSpot parent company AnchorFree denied the researchers’ findings in an email to Ars Technica: «We never redirect our users’ traffic to any third-party resources instead of the websites they intended to visit. The free version of our Hotspot Shield solution openly and clearly states that it is funded by ads, however, we intercept no traffic with neither the free nor the premium version of our solutions.»
AnchorFree has since offered annual transparency reports, although their value is still up to the reader. More recently, however, HotSpot Shield was among just a handful of VPN apps found to respect users’ refusal to permit ad-tracking. In a November 2021 study from Top10VPN, just 15% of free VPN apps respected iOS users’ choices when they declined voluntary ad-tracking. The rest of the free VPN apps tested by Top10VPN simply ignored users’ Do Not Track requests.
Even if possible credit card fraud isn’t a concern, you don’t need pop-ups and ad-lag weighing you down when you’ve already got to deal with another major problem with free VPNs.
4. Buffering… buffering… buffering
One of the top reasons people get a VPN is to access their favorite subscription services or streaming site — Hulu, HBO, Netflix — when they travel to countries where those companies block access based on your location. But what’s the point in accessing the geo-blocked video content you’ve paid for if the free VPN service you’re using is so slow you can’t watch it, despite a good internet connection?
Some free VPNs have been known to sell your bandwidth, potentially putting you on the legal hook for whatever they do with it. The most famous case of this was Hola VPN, which was caught in 2015 quietly stealing users’ bandwidth and selling it, mercenary-style, to whatever group wanted to deploy the user base as a botnet.
Back then, Hola CEO Ofer Vilenski admitted they’d been had by a «spammer» but contended in a lengthy defense that this harvesting of bandwidth was typical for this type of technology.
«We assumed that by stating that Hola is a [peer-to-peer] network, it was clear that people were sharing their bandwidth with the community network in return for their free service,» he wrote.
If being pressed into service as part of a botnet isn’t enough to slow you down, free VPN services also usually pay for fewer VPN server options. That means your traffic is generally bouncing around longer between distant, overcrowded servers, or even waiting behind the traffic of paid users.
To top it off, subscription streaming sites are savvy to those who try to sneak into their video services for free. These services routinely block large numbers of IP addresses they’ve identified as belonging to turnstile-jumping freeloaders. Free VPNs can’t afford to invest in a long list of fresh IP addresses for users the way a paid VPN service can.
That means you may not even be able to log into a streaming service you’ve paid for if your free VPN is using a stale batch of IPs. Good luck getting HBO Max to load over that VPN connection.
5. Paid options get better all the time
The good news is that there are a lot of solid VPNs on the market that offer a range of features, depending on your needs and budget. You can browse our ratings and reviews to find the right VPN software for you. If you’re looking for something mobile-specific, we’ve rounded up our favorite mobile VPNs for 2022.
If you’d like a primer before deciding which service to drop the cash on, we have a VPN buyer’s guide to help you get a handle on the basics of VPNs and what to look for when choosing a VPN service.
More VPN advice
Technologies
iPhone WWDC Wishes: What We Want to See Apple Include in iOS 19
Whether Apple calls it iOS 19 or iOS 26, these are some of the things we hope the tech giant brings to the iPhone next.

Apple is set to hold its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, when the tech giant will show the world what it’s been cooking up during the past year for iOS 19 — or iOS 26 — the software that runs the iPhone. Until then, CNET’s experts have their own ideas about what Apple should bring to the iPhone.
While iOS 18 brought some useful new features to all iPhones, like RCS messaging, and Apple Intelligence to newer iPhones, we’re still taking bets on what Apple will include in iOS 19. Reports suggest Apple is planning a significant redesign of the iPhone OS, changing everything from icons, apps, menus and more. But CNET’s writers and editors have a few ideas we’d like to see in the upcoming OS. Some things we’ve asked for in the past, like customizable lock screen controls, have come to fruition, so maybe we’ll hit the mark again this year.
Here are some of the features and changes we hope Apple includes in the upcoming iOS software.
Bring split screen to the iPhone
Add a native split screen. It’s been available on Android phones and the iPad for years. But on iOS I still have to run my calculator and budget tracking note in two separate windows.
— Mike Sorrentino
Start a workout right from my iPhone
I’d like the ability to start an outdoor workout from the Fitness app on my iPhone (like I can do in Strava or Polar). That way if I forget to wear my Apple Watch or I don’t have one, I can still record my workout. The Apple Watch uses heart rate data to calculate move minutes but I don’t see why the iPhone can’t give me credit for an actual workout using other indicators like distance/pace on a run.
— Vanessa Hand Orellana
No more green bubbles, please
I’m overjoyed Apple added RCS messaging with iOS 18, but I’m going to dream big here: I’d love it if texts with Android users weren’t still green! While it’s great to be able to finally send high-resolution media and see typing indicators with folks who aren’t also using iMessage, it’s still far too easy for iPhone users to scoff at anyone turning their text thread green. End the pettiness once and for all!
— Abrar Al-Heeti
An easier way to manage unused apps
I have more apps on my iPhone than I’ll ever use, after years of installing things to try out and then forgetting about them. Shunting everything into the App Library helps get it out of mind, but that’s the app version of keeping a box of cables you think you might need some day. So I’d like a way to clean up apps, similar to how you can identify large apps in Settings > General > Storage. Let me see when I installed them, the last time I used them and be able to delete the ones I no longer want. I know this sounds fiddly but the thought of going through them all manually is exhausting, so that will never happen.
— Jeff Carlson
Searchable clipboard manager for all your copy and paste needs
I want a clipboard manager in iOS 19. The iPhone has a single copy and paste option, meaning if you copy something, and then copy something else, that first thing you copied is lost. For iOS 19, I’d love to see a searchable clipboard manager, one that has a history of all the things I’ve copied in the last hour, day, week or even month. And if I paste something, I’d like to see multiple options that I can choose from appear right at my fingertip.
— Nelson Aguilar
More customization options for all screens
I want more lock screen, home screen and Control Center customization options, please. I’d like to place my lock screen controls elsewhere on the screen so I don’t accidentally open any control — including, yes, my flashlight. Same thing with the home screen. I appreciate being able to place apps anywhere as long as they are within Apple’s oppressive grid that locks our apps into little boxes. If you have large icons — like I do — there’s an entire empty row at the bottom where it looks like apps or folders can go there but they can’t. Let us breathe the air of freedom, Apple! Please, for the love of everything good, let me move the scroll bar on the right side of the Control Center. I keep hitting it when I open the Control Center and it takes me to a page I don’t intend to be on, which makes it frustrating to use.
— Zach McAuliffe
Long press, double click and more action button triggers
Now that the Action button is on more iPhones, please add support for triggering different shortcuts with multiple presses. In its current setup, I can set the Action button to trigger one action at a time. By default it can toggle between turning on the ringer and putting your iPhone into silent mode. But there are a number of other options for it like being able to open the Camera app and take a photo or make an elaborate automation in the Shortcuts app like to use it to order coffee from Dunkin’.
But the Action button could do so much more if Apple would add support for multiple input clicks. Like it could be a toggle for ringer/silent mode with a single long press, but do something else (like turn on/off the flashlight) with a double-long press. I think this would add so much functionality to the button and as a result open it up to even more people taking more advantage of it.
— Patrick Holland
Better Log video editing tools
I want iOS 19 to add better editing tools for Log video. The ability to shoot Log footage directly on the iPhone is amazing for enthusiastic filmmakers like me but it can only be edited by transferring it off of your phone to an iPad or MacBook. I’d love to see Apple bring deeper editing tools to be able to add cinematic color grades to your Log footage directly on your iPhone.
— Andrew Lanxon
Intelligently organize photos by event in the Photos app
Okay, we’re all glad that in iOS 18 Apple improved the Photos search by adding AI image recognition to actually bring up all the images of your cats. It slightly makes up for the questionable revamped layout of photos and albums that confuses me to this day. I’d love it if in iOS 19, the Photos app had a new way to view photos: in a timeline intelligently organized by event. Say you go to the park for a birthday and have a bunch of photos clearly from the same occasion — the app prompts you to confirm they’re all connected, asks for a title and, boom, event logged. Then I could look at a vertical timeline of logged events from the past few months or years, all of which can be searched if I can’t quite remember, say, when I last went to the park. Yes, I can do this manually by making albums, but it’s the kind of fastidious labor I just can’t bring myself to keep up with. That’s what I want AI to do for me.
— David Lumb
Simple volume controls across the iPhone
Sometimes it’s the small changes that can help make for a smoother experience. I want to see Apple clean up volume controls. If I set the volume to a certain level, I want it to stay at that level for all applications. Sometimes the settings can vary depending on what you’re doing. Too often I come across the problem of lowering my volume to prepare to listen to something — but surprise! — the volume is loud again because I put in headphones and it keeps the louder setting I used the last time I listened to music in my headphones. It just leads to unnecessary frustrations, and makes users feel like they don’t really have control of their devices.
— Bridget Carey
For more on Apple, here’s what to expect from WWDC 2025 and our thoughts on the iPhone 16 Pro and iOS 18 months after their launch. You can also check out our iOS 18 cheat sheet.
Technologies
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’: The Huge Tax and Medicaid Implications You Need to Know
The GOP’s contentious budget bill narrowly passed in the House, faces dissent in the Senate and has drawn the ire of Elon Musk in a big way.
President Donald Trump has made the extension of the 2017 tax cuts one of his major second-term economic goals — you know, aside from all those tariffs — but as the so-called «One Big Beautiful Bill» has moved forward, it’s faced major pushback. Some of this opposition might lead to significant changes to the bill and how it might ultimately impact you, especially when it comes to taxes and services like Medicaid.
After much back-and-forth, negotiation and failed votes, the bill passed in the House of Representatives by the thinnest margin possible, 215-214-1. The bill is now moving through the Senate, where it is expected to face more alterations before getting across the finish line. While the GOP has been attempting to use the reconciliation process to avoid the bill being filibustered by Democrats, it is still expected to face intra-party dissent similar to what it went through in the House over its cuts either being too severe or not severe enough.
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO and one-time Trump adviser who led the «DOGE» government consolidation efforts, spoke out against the bill in an unsparing fashion in a Tuesday post to X, decrying it as too heavy on spending. This disagreement with Trump and his agenda led to a prolonged public spat between the president and his one-time senior advisor.
«This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination,» Musk wrote. «Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.»
Despite the broad nature of the bill, one of its central goals remains the extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Passed for the first time early in his first term, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as it was officially known, was one of Trump’s signature legislative accomplishments and has generally become known as the «Trump tax cuts.» Given the nature of how that bill was passed initially, a lot of its provisions are set to expire next year if a new extension isn’t passed, so doing just that has unsurprisingly emerged as a major priority for Trump and the GOP-led houses of Congress.
The president and his allies have also tried to claim that his aggressive tariff agenda could help offset the extension of the tax cuts, although, as we’ve touched on before at CNET, that is just one of the often-contradictory stated goals for the tariffs.
Details about the budget bill Republicans have emerged in the past few weeks as it moved through the House Ways and Means Committee approval process. The Congressional Budget Office, an agency that provides estimates about the economic impacts of budgetary bills that is not affiliated with any party, estimated that the cuts called for in this bill would cost millions of people their health insurance and food benefits. The proposal initially failed to pass a vote in the House, leading to its cuts for Medicaid becoming even heavier.
All this comes in addition to the longstanding criticism from Democrats and other critics that Trump’s tax cuts disproportionately help the wealthiest Americans more than the working class. While there is truth to that argument, and to the Republican counter that the tax cuts would provide some help to taxpayers at all incomes, the new proposed cuts unveiled this week have given more weight to the notion that they will be more harmful for the least wealthy Americans.
For all the details about what extending the tax cuts will actually mean and what the current terms mean for things like Medicaid, keep reading. For more, find out if Trump could actually abolish the Department of Education.
How will the budget bill impact Medicaid?
According to the estimates from the Congressional Budget Office mentioned at the start of this piece, at least 7.6 million Americans would lose Medicaid health insurance under the provisions in the budget proposal. That’s nearly 11% of the 70 million Americans who are currently insured by Medicaid. The proposal would, among other things, require people without dependent children or a disability to meet an 80-hour-a-month work requirement to qualify for Medicaid and increase the frequency with which people will need to confirm their continued eligibility.
These new requirements were originally set to take effect in 2029 under the bill’s failed House version, but they were moved forward to 2026 in the bill’s passed version.
What would extending the Trump tax cuts mean?
While the phrase «Trump tax cuts» has become a common media shorthand for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the current conversation around it might suggest that new cuts could be on the way. Although Trump has floated ideas for additional cuts, it’s important to note that extending the 2017 provisions would, for the most part, keep tax rates and programs at the levels they’ve been at since then.
So while it may be a better option than having the provisions expire — which would increase certain tax rates and decrease certain credits — extending the tax cuts most likely won’t change how you’ve been taxed the past eight years. However, some estimates have predicted that extending the cuts would boost income in 2026, with the conservative-leaning Tax Foundation in particular predicting a 2.9% rise on average, based on a combination of other economic predictions combined with tax rates staying where they are.
What would change if the Trump tax cuts expire?
Republicans contend that the tax cuts helped a wide swath of Americans, and the Tax Foundation predicted that 60% of tax filers would see higher rates in 2026 without an extension.
A big part of that has to do with tax bracket changes. The 2017 provisions lowered the income tax rates across the seven brackets, aside from the first (10%) and the sixth (35%). If the current law expires, those rates would go up by between 1% and 3%.
Income limits for each bracket would also revert to pre-2017 levels. Lending credence to the Democrats’ counterarguments, these shifts under the Trump tax cuts appeared to be more beneficial to individuals and couples at higher income levels than to those making closer to the average US income.
If you’re interested in the nitty-gritty numbers, you can check out the Tax Foundation’s full breakdown. Another point in Democrats’ favor? The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act also cut corporate tax rates from 35% to 21%, and unlike many of its other provisions, this one was permanent and won’t expire in 2026.
What would happen to the standard deduction?
This is another area in which a lot of people would be hit hard. The standard deduction lets taxpayers lower their taxable income, as long as they forgo itemizing any deductions.
For the 2025 tax year, the standard deduction is $15,000 for individual filers and $30,000 for joint filers. If the tax cuts expire, these numbers will drop by nearly half, down to $8,350 for individuals and $16,700 for joint filers.
Under the current reconciliation bill, the deduction would increase to $16,000 for individuals and $32,000 for joint filers, but only through 2028.
What would happen to the child tax credit?
The child tax credit is one of the most popular credits. Its current levels — $2,000 per qualifying child, which phases out starting at a gross income of $200,000 for single filers and $400,000 for joint filers — were actually set by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
If an extension or new bill isn’t passed, next year the child tax credit would revert to its old levels: $1,000 per child, which starts phasing out at $75,000 for single filers and $110,000 for joint filers.
If the current budget bill is implemented, the credit will be upped to $2,500 per child through 2028, before dropping to $2,000 as its new permanent rate.
Do the Trump tax cuts really favor the wealthy?
Higher-income individuals and couples fared notably better with the changes the Trump tax cuts made to tax brackets. An estimate from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank, found that the poorest 20% of Americans would see only about 1% of the bill’s net tax cuts. Numerous similar estimates agree that these small benefits for the poorest taxpayers would be outweighed by rising costs caused by tariffs.
Conversely, ITEP’s estimate found that the richest 20% of US taxpayers would benefit from around 67% of the bill’s net tax cuts, with the richest 5% benefitting from half of them.
How much would extending the tax cuts cost?
Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Tax Foundation have estimated that the reconciliation bill’s tax cut extension would raise the US deficit by $4.5 trillion over the course of 10 years. The Tax Foundation also estimated that it could raise the country’s GDP to offset that number, but only by about $710 billion, or about 16% of the deficit increase.
For more, see how Trump’s tariffs might be affecting the prices of several key products in our daily tracker.
Technologies
Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Saturday, June 7
Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for June 7.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.
Today’s NYT Mini Crossword could be tricky. 1-Down and 5-Down stumped me for a while, but the other letters filled it in for me. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.
The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.
Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword
Let’s get to those Mini Crossword clues and answers.
Mini across clues and answers
1A clue: Yoga class need
Answer: MAT
4A clue: Umlaut, rotated 90°
Answer: COLON
6A clue: «That is shocking!»
Answer: OHMYGOD
8A clue: «___ You the One?» (reality TV show)
Answer: ARE
9A clue: Egg cells
Answer: OVA
10A clue: One of two «royal» sleeping options
Answer: KINGBED
12A clue: Bar seating
Answer: STOOL
13A clue: Favorite team of the «Chicago Pope,» for short
Answer: SOX
Mini down clues and answers
1D clue: Slices of life
Answer: MOMENTS
2D clue: Olympic gymnast Raisman
Answer: ALY
3D clue: Request at the end of a restaurant meal
Answer: TOGOBOX
4D clue: Hayes of MSNBC
Answer: CHRIS
5D clue: Medium for Melville or McCarthy
Answer: NOVEL
6D clue: Wood used for wine barrels
Answer: OAK
7D clue: June honoree
Answer: DAD
11D clue: Sticky stuff
Answer: GOO
How to play more Mini Crosswords
The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.
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