Bright VPN: a free service without registration

Just type “free VPN” in a search engine to realize the abundance of the offer. If this plethora of solutions may seem encouraging, we have already raised the problem of free VPNs. Indeed, the technical infrastructures being expensive, these services must imperatively find sources of income, either by the posting of publicity, or by the resale of data.

It is worth noting that the use of paid VPNs does not necessarily ensure the privacy of your Internet use. Indeed, even if you use encrypted protocols, your requests can be tracked by the VPN provider, who can know when you connect, for how long, to which sites you are browsing and which protocols you are using. Naturally, VPNs ensure that they do not record this data, but it is always difficult to be sure, especially when the service provider operates from countries with “light” legislation. It is therefore a transfer of trust from your traditional ISP to the VPN provider that takes place. In addition, VPNs can also collect data at the time of subscription (credit card, email…).

Bright VPN: another approach

On its website, Bright VPN assures that it is not interested in our personal data. This may seem at first sight quite paradoxical for a company (Bright Data) precisely specialized in the analysis of internet data for companies… But it is the companies that are targeted by Bright VPN, which uses your internet connection to create a database of IP addresses around the world. Because if the use of the VPN for the private individual is free, the service is paying for the companies. Indeed, Bright Data offers its customers — businesses — to use the IP addresses of Bright VPN users — you — to research and acquire public data. On the site, we can read that “BrightData [la société mère de Bright VPN] collects public information from the web for them and pays for your VPN. In exchange, you allow Bright Data to access the web from your IP address, in order to perform the following functions: price comparison, search engine optimization, ad verification, academic research…“. As with individuals, Bright Data offers companies a VPN that allows you to geolocate anywhere in the world anonymously. It is interesting to note that the software allows you to select which services can be consulted from your internet connection. Note however that Bright VPN is not as rich in options as paid services: you will not find double VPN connections here, split-tunneling to pass certain connections out of the VPN or masking (obfuscated). In addition, the communication protocol is limited to IKEv2, while most paid services now offer the newer and faster WireGuard.

No registration

If Bright VPN does not offer its code in open source, which is always a sign of transparency, the company specifies on its site that the code is verified by an external provider every three months. However, the audit reports do not appear to be accessible for verification. The most positive aspect remains the absence of registration to the service: it is enough to install the application (only on Windows for the moment) to access more than 1000 places in more than 120 countries. Without registration, tracking connections is still possible, but reconciling with your identity is more difficult.

And the debits?

Does Bright VPN offer good speeds? This is what we wanted to estimate via a few measurements thanks to nPerf with a VPN release in France. With a very fast connection (1 Gb/s), the loss of throughput is around 50% downhill and almost 75% uphill. As for the ping, we go from 4.6 ms to 8 ms.

We are quite far from the performance that can be obtained with the most modern communication protocols (WireGuard) of services like ProtonVPN, NordVPN or even Mullvad. The latter can climb beyond 600 Mb/s in download and in upload. But for a free service, it’s still very effective, especially without invasive ads or data transfer throttling.

Be careful, if you thought you were downloading torrent files legally (Linux distribution ISO, games…), go your way, Bright VPN does not allow this type of connection. To do this, you will need to use a “classic” VPN service and consult our comparison.