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With the recent announcement of a free VPN on their Opera browser, the VPN world has been set alight. This excitement, however, is unwarranted. Sorry, but this Opera VPN review is not going to be a gushing thank you. First and foremost, the Opera VPN is not a VPN…

Opera VPN review: A good try, but not enough

What I saw in the first Opera VPN review I read, and which continued in a few others, is that people don’t seem to understand what a VPN is. Opera is, as far as we can tell and have been told, a proxy server.

All we know about the Opera VPN is:

• It allows you to change your IP address, getting you past some cases of geo-blocking.
• It only allows you to use it through Opera, none of your other Internet traffic is protected.
• We have absolutely no details on their encryption protocols.
• There has not been any sharing on the status of their data collection, sharing, or willingness to work with authorities.

Knowing all this, the Opera ‘VPN’ is little more than a proxy server with a misleading name.

Other facts about the Opera VPN

Ok, we know that it’s free. Everyone loves free. Facebook is free. YouTube is free. Twitter is free. But …how do those entities make money? They collect and store data about you and sell that to advertisers, and they show you ads. Lots of ads. That’s how.

Is this how Opera ultimately looks to make money off of their VPN? Are they collecting data off of users to routing through their VPN to sell to advertisers? That’s my worry with every ‘free’ VPN I come across. There are some exceptions, like Cyberghost VPN who offer a free VPN which is supported by their paid side. Everyone out there needs to stop and think about who is actually paying for their ‘free’ service, because at the end of the day someone has to pay the bills.

A few other details to consider:

• The Opera VPN only has servers in the USA, Canada, and the UK. If you’re an expat of literally any other country who wants to unlock content in your home country, and it isn’t one of these three, you’re out of luck.
• There are no data limits imposed, or time limits. Again, that’s a lot of data that someone, somewhere, has to pay for in some way.
• Problems have been reported of IP leaks via the WebRTC bug. It can be fixed with a complicated workaround which the average user, who will want a free ‘VPN’, will struggle with. Many will likely never test the VPN to see if it leaks and won’t even enjoy a true VPN experience.
• The VPN only operates within Opera. Those trying to do torrenting or p2p will have no protection of their downloads. Anyone trying to do secure file transfers, to their lawyer, doctor, or workplace, will also have no protection.

These are not 4 small problems. Each one underlines the fact that you can’t trust Opera’s VPN to be a true VPN. At best, you can trust it to be a proxy server which you use to unlock some, but not all due to their very limited servers, web content.

Is the Opera VPN any good?

It’s good if you want a proxy server. If you want a VPN you’re going to have to either use a free VPN like Cyberghost, which is supported by paid subscriptions, or spend as little as $3.33/month on Private Internet Access to have a real VPN experience.

I don’t have any problem with Opera itself. I’m using Opera right now, and have been for over a year, to type and upload this article. But calling their new browser-based proxy service a VPN …isn’t exactly what I’d call accurate.

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