
- #HOLA VPN BROWSER EXTENSION INSTALL#
- #HOLA VPN BROWSER EXTENSION UPGRADE#
- #HOLA VPN BROWSER EXTENSION FULL#
The down side is this will share some of your bandwidth and resources with other Hola users the advantage is it encourages you to use Hola only when absolutely necessary.
#HOLA VPN BROWSER EXTENSION INSTALL#
If you're uncomfortable with Hola monitoring every URL you visit, you can refuse to install the extension and use its custom browser app, instead. (This worked instantly with our YouTube channel, although that's not much of an achievement YouTube has no significant VPN protection, and just about everything can unblock it with ease.) In these situations, you're able to use Hola much like any other VPN tap the address bar icon, choose your preferred location, the web page refreshes and hopefully you're able to view your content.
#HOLA VPN BROWSER EXTENSION FULL#
When we visited one YouTube channel, for instance, we were served only the couple of videos approved for our UK location, and not the full selection available in the US. Hola won't always notice when you need assistance.
#HOLA VPN BROWSER EXTENSION UPGRADE#
The free version only allows an hour per day on some of the most popular sites, though, including Netflix - you'll need to upgrade to the paid plan to get unlimited time.

This worked for us with US Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and more. Hola was able to unblock many popular streaming sites in our tests but you're limited to just an hour per day unless you upgrade to a paid plan (Image credit: Hola) If anonymity is your top priority and you're looking to reduce even the possibility of monitoring, Hola absolutely is not for you. There are plenty of logging possibilities here, then, and when you factor in the lack of detail about other crucial areas of the service - how is your traffic encrypted and protected? We've no idea - this has to be a concern. It also collects 'details of applications that are installed on the user’s device', which you might not expect.Īs usual, if you sign up with a social network account, this gives Hola access to details 'such as your full name, home address, email address, birth date, profile picture, friends list, personal description, as well as any other information you made publicly available on such account or agreed to share with us.' Personal data Hola 'may collect and retain includes your IP address, your name and email address, screen name, payment and billing information or other information we may ask from time to time as will be required for the on-boarding process and services provisioning.' The company says it may collect log data, which can include 'browser type, web pages you visit, time spent on those pages, access times and dates.' There's some support for this in the Privacy Policy, too. The company says it monitors what users are doing on the network, to some degree, and that it can track back to identify the origin of any request it considers as 'misuse' or part of a 'security breach.' This is great for catching hackers, but it also requires more monitoring and logging than you'll see with standard VPNs. Some VPN networks don't see both ends of the connection, and are therefore much more attractive for these uses." This makes Hola VPN un-attractive to abusers. In addition, architecture modifications allow Hola VPN to see the origin of each request, thus if a cybercriminal were to use the Hola VPN network, the cybercriminal’s information may be passed on to the authorities. "Hola VPN regularly monitors the consumer network for traces of misuse or security breaches. Here's an interesting section from Hola's FAQ: Hola's model of routing data through its users might seem a better way to protect your privacy, but it's not quite that simple. Most VPNs route your traffic through their own servers, providing at least the possibility that they can log what you're doing. Hola collects quite a bit of data about its users online activity (Image credit: Hola) Privacy and logging


If you can live with its basic principles, though, Hola's core service is free for non-commercial use, and that's the product we're reviewing here. It's priced from $7.69 a month on the annual plan. You can avoid many of these problems by upgrading to Hola Premium, which doesn't share your bandwidth with other users, works on more platforms, and enables using a network of Hola's own servers. If they're sending spam, hacking or doing anything else dubious, your IP address could become the one associated with that action. Maybe a more significant concern is that any Hola user could effectively become an exit server for someone else. Even then, it claims to use no more than 3MB a day from mobile devices, 100MB from desktops. But the company says it only uses devices when they're idle, and connected to an electricity source. One potential issue is if you install one of the apps (not the browser extensions), you're allowing Hola to use some of your system and network resources, as other users access the sites they need via your connection.
