F-Secure Freedome VPN review

F-Secure Freedome VPN review: F-Secure Freedome is a virtual private network, or VPN, of the well-known security company F-Secure. It protects your internet traffic against snooping and shields your IP address. But F-Secure goes further and protects you against phishing sites, malware, and advertisers. It’s powerful protection, but the cost increases quickly when you need to cover many devices and lack some of the advanced features found in the best VPN services.

F-Secure Freedome VPN review: Privacy and logging

Freedome’s privacy policy is short, clear and direct, focused on what you need and want to know, and so readable that it violates most of the competition’s pages.

It begins at the top of the document, with simple policy statements:

• “We don’t share or sell any of your traffic.”
• “We don’t read your traffic.”
• “We don’t know what traffic is yours.

The page contains several log information, including “the device ID and public IP address from which the VPN customer connects to our service,” the length of a session, and the amount of bandwidth used. But it also explains the purpose of this (to protect against fraudulent use), how long the logs are kept (90 days), and points out that there is no way to identify what you did once you were connected to the server.

F-Secure even highlights potential problems with its functions. For example, the Tracker Mapper needs to record the tracking data to show you the map, but the privacy policy explains that this is optional and when and exactly how it is deleted.

If you add it all together, F-Secure seems to be making a real effort to ensure that its customers understand any privacy issues, and other companies could learn a lot from this approach.

F-Secure Freedome VPN review: Performance

F-Secure claims that Freedome can help you bypass geoblocking, giving you access to content you might not otherwise be able to see. However, we didn’t want to take the company’s word for it and did a few small tests ourselves. Freedome could not get us into BBC iPlayer, a disappointment because it worked with our latest review. But we had success with US Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and even Disney+, a good result overall.

Our performance testing got off to a good start with Freedome managing 65-68Mbps on our UK test 75Mbps line and UK connections to most of Europe with a range of at least 50Mbps. However, speeds between the UK and the US were slower and less consistent, at 10-40Mbps.

To find out if this was a local problem or something more widespread, we reran our speed tests from a European data center. The results still showed a significant difference – European speeds peaked at 170-180Mbps, connections to the U.S. managed at 60-70Mbps – and actual performance is likely to be less (your home may not be able to meet the connectivity of our data center). Still, even our very lowest 10Mbps speed could work for browsing and even streaming, and overall, Freedome delivered a highly functional performance in most locations.

F-Secure Freedome VPN review: Pricing and plans

F-Secure Freedome VPN prices are a little more complicated than average. There is no monthly plan, but you can protect three devices for the equivalent of $2.92 per month in year 1, $4.58 at renewal. Covering seven devices costs $5.83 for the first year, $7.50 for renewal. That looks a little too expensive for us. F-Secure expects you to pay $69.99 to protect seven devices for one year; give Surfshark $47.88, and it protects unlimited devices for two.

F-Secure has a better value option in its seven devices, two-year plan, though, priced at $3.75 a month for the first term, $4.99 at the renewal.

Whatever you think about pricing, F-Secure believes it can convince you because it offers a free 5-day trial with no payment details required. And if you like what you see and sign up, you are still protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Final words

When we first took a closer look at F-Secure Freedome, we found it remarkable that an antivirus company started focusing on VPNs. But that’s changing because more security products are trying to protect customers from malware and a wide range of attacks. Hopefully, this VPN will make it as standard a consumer product as antivirus, making the work of hackers, advertisers, and government oversight much more difficult. The broad device support and the many servers around the world are also excellent. That’s it for our F-Secure Freedome VPN review.