Hotspot Shield Review 2023 | Security.org

Hotspot Shield Features

Moving on with our review, let’s talk about Hotspot Shield’s features. When we test VPNs, there are certain features we look for in relation to how secure VPNs are and how convenient they are to use. Here’s what we found out about Hotspot Shield.

Will Hotspot Shield Log My Data?

If a VPN logs your IP address, for instance, and the government asks it to provide the IP addresses that accessed a certain server at a certain date and time, they’ll be able to tie your browsing activity back to you.

That’s not good, and is a particular worry for VPN companies in the United States as the government has the power to subpoena company records for the purpose of criminal investigation.

Like most VPNs, Hotspot Shield says it has a “no logging” policy. On the Hotspot Shield website, it says that it “doesn’t log any data that could be tied to you, shielding your identity and info from hackers and cyber predators.”

That sounds good, but it’s a little vague. So to clear our minds, we checked what exactly does Hotspot Shield record. You can learn more in our Hotspot Shield privacy report, but to summarize, Hotspot Shield records:

• Duration of VPN sessions
• Amount of bandwidth each session consumed
• Domains that users access, but on an anonymized format so that Hotspot Shield doesn’t know who accessed what domains
• Device hashes that the service uses to distinguish between different users, particularly for services that don’t require users to register accounts
• Account information
• Billing and payment information
• Identity verification information
• Communication information (via email, phone or chat).

Hotspot Shield also mentions that it provides location information gathered from its free Android app to its advertising partners, so keep that in mind if you’re thinking of using Hotspot Shield Free on your Android device.

Overall, this is more information than we would like for Hotspot Shield to collect and a little more than the average VPN. For example, when we tested and reviewed ExpressVPN, one of our top VPN choices, it didn’t log this kind of metadata.

One positive takeaway from Hotspot Shield’s logging policy, however, is that it doesn’t record anything that can tie you to your browsing activity while connected to the service. It doesn’t record your original IP address, and because VPN IP addresses are shared among users, there’s no way for Hotspot Shield to know who visited which website. All the service-related data it records is used to improve its services.

Does Hotspot Shield Have A Kill Switch?

A kill switch is a software tool that will shut down your internet automatically if you lose connection to a VPN server. This is a crucial feature if you are serious about maintaining your privacy. Without it, your ISP would see your IP address which it could tie to your VPN activity if you lose your VPN connection even momentarily.

The kill switch feature is available to Hotspot Shield’s Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android users.

Does Hotspot Shield Offer Split Tunneling?

Split tunneling lets you route some traffic through your ISP and some through the VPN. Think of it as using VPN on some apps on your computer or smartphone, and using the regular internet on others. For instance, you can simultaneously use your VPN to watch Netflix shows abroad and browse local news articles without a VPN.

The free version of Hotspot Shield doesn’t include split tunneling, which is unfortunate because split tunneling could lower your VPN bandwidth usage. When you turn on the free VPN, all your device’s traffic goes through the VPN server, including traffic from bandwidth-heavy apps. For premium accounts, though, split tunneling is available under the name Smart VPN.

Can I Use Netflix with Hotspot Shield?

Hotspot Shield optimized its premium plans for use with Netflix, YouTube, Disney+, and other streaming platforms as well as torrenting. Premium account users can obtain connection speeds of up to one Gbps (depending on your network’s speed, of course), which is perfect for high-definition streaming.

That is, if you pay for a subscription. Although Hotspot Shield offers a free plan, this plan only delivers 500 MB of bandwidth per day. You can watch ads to increase your limit, but isn’t the point of streaming to be able to watch your favorite shows without ads? Moreover, the free plan only gives you access to one server location in the United States, so you won’t be able to unlock Netflix libraries of other regions anyway.

Hotspot Shield Encryption

The standard encryption for your data when using Hotspot Shield is 256-bit AES. This encryption method is pretty much unbreakable. They say it would take 14 billion years to decrypt AES-256 with the world’s current supercomputers using brute-force attacks.

Let’s just say your ISP probably won’t find how many gigabytes of Jackie Chan films you’ve been torrenting. Although, let us just remind you that downloading copyrighted content is illegal, even if you’re using a VPN.

Hotspot Shield Protocols

Internet protocols determine how data packets are dispatched across a network. You can think of protocols as the different routes cars can take to get between their origins and their destinations.

You could take a government highway to get to your safe house in the woods, but then security cameras might have recorded you. Or you could take back roads the whole way, but it might take you days. This is the kind of trade-off you often face between security and performance.

Hydra

Hotspot Shield bucks the trend of VPNs using popular VPN protocols like SSTP or OpenVPN. Instead, it uses its own proprietary protocol, Hydra. Hotspot Shield says that it used to use popular VPN protocols like IPsec and OpenVPN, but found performance and latency challenges. That’s why it developed Hydra, a VPN protocol that is supposed to perform better than current protocols, while providing the same level of security.

Hotspot Shield claims that Hydra:

• Has a faster connection to VPN servers
• Uses less bandwidth when transporting data through encrypted tunnels
• Offers connection speeds 2.4 times faster for long-distance connections, compared to OpenVPN

As you will see in our Hotspot Shield speed test results below, there is some truth to these claims. Hydra, and by extension, Hotspot Shield, indeed performed incredibly fast. And when it comes to data security, Hydra did prevent our IP address from leaking out.

But is Hydra better than more widely used, open-source protocols like OpenVPN? We don’t think so. At best, it’s a good alternative that provides about the same speed and security as OpenVPN. However, it’s new and it’s proprietary, so it will take a lot more real-world testing to convince us, but kudos to Hotspot Shield for trying to innovate.