You must be high and drunk to recommend Norton AND McAfee
Hotspot Shield? I remember it being a sketchy VPN with not so great reviews. Even though the post is pretty old the company’s past is always valid. I hope that with them being acquired by Aura things will get better (not like ExpressVPN being acquired by Cape, it was a good VPN and they showed their no-logs policy in a raid). I guess if it’s used by BitDefender it isn’t so bad after all, although some people prefer Mullvad (isn’t as cheap and is around 6 bucks a month, but it guarantees that its servers don’t run on money from questionable sources). I personally use Proton and I think it’s great (although there’s this case).
You’re worried about Norton and Mcafee in that list after they recommended “Systweak Antivirus”?
Yeah, reason why I used NordVPN for many years especially when they where one of the first to deploy all RAM servers. I’m not discrediting their product by any means, it’s really good and fast, just very expensive comparatively since I’ve started moving to using a Firewalla and Wireguard setup. I think their 2 Year renewal paid upfront was around ~$116 for Black Friday, Bitdefender for 5 years through Newegg was $100 for 5 years. Nowdays I only occasionally need a Public VPN service outside of my private Wireguard, Bitdefender was much cheaper and also has zero logging validated by an independent audit.
Yeah there is number of companies licensing their software now but not sure who all of them are. I first heard about it because I subscribe to Aura for ID Protection so their Avira based client apps also bundle in the VPN when they acquired them but their implementation is clunky and doesn’t allow setting server or country location like the Bitdefender version does. Most of my day to day I just run an always on Wireguard VPN back to Firewalla at home. Since on that device I have all the ad blocking, malicious website block, NextDNS, etc all running, Wireguard extends to my phone way more protection than any commercial VPN could provide. Once in a while when I travel or need to troubleshoot if my Firewalla is blocking something I flip on my other VPN, paying so much for NordVPN or any of the others I couldn’t justify but since Bitdefender is so cheap gave it a shot and haven’t had any complaints. They also had them submit to an independent source code and logging audit as well so also why I trusted them.
I think Hotspot Shield started off as one of those free VPNs that had a lot of privacy problems but they’ve been bought a few different times now and only have paid options.
https://www.bitdefender.com/company/VPN-Audit-Pango-2023.html
Never heard of systweak. The other two viruses, I have heard of.