Not recommended

Hotspot Shield

Commercial VPNUnited StatesRank 65 of 68Usability: floor only

Paying monthly

$1.99 per month

Paying yearly

$29.00 billed once a year

Coverage

Not published no country list published

Free tier

Yes limited free plan

0 out of 100

Security

73 out of 100

Usability

Visit site

Service class

Commercial VPN — security leads

Security score

0 of 100 · Not recommended

Usability score

73 of 100 · state no_data · 50% established · 47.1% of the weight read

Legal entity

Intersections, LLC (site copyright footer); the VPN privacy notice is published under the Pango brand and the 2023 audit/transparency report under the Pango Group name

Jurisdiction

United States

Ultimate owner

Point Wild, formed December 2024 when Pango Group (which had separated from Aura in August 2024) merged with Total Security; Pango Group itself began as AnchorFree, Inc., was acquired by Aura on 2020-07-07, and operated as a sister business unit of Aura from June 2021 until the 2024 separation

Exposure

Medium · dominant channel: integrity

Retention

Session metadata

Latest audit

Aon · 25 Aug 2023 · One-off · unknown

Countries with exits

not published

Protocols

IPsec OpenVPN A vendor protocol with no published source

Works under active censorship

unknown

Weakest protocol still offered

A vendor protocol with no published source

Own DNS inside the tunnel

unknown

Platforms

Android iOS macOS Windows

Simultaneous devices

Kill switch

unknown

Split tunnelling

Available

Signing up

unknown

Offered countries that sit under a logging mandateC09_mandate_countries

unknown

Country of the ultimate beneficial ownerM11_owner_jurisdiction

Owner group cluster keyM15_owner_group

independent

Date the current owner took controlM16_control_since

2020-07

Role of this brand inside the groupM17_brand_role

principal

Infrastructure shared with cluster siblingsM18_shared_infrastructure

unknown

Total published auditsV10_audit_count

Where the security score comes from

Eight channels, each asking one question of the published record and reading a named set of fields to answer it. They multiply rather than add — the factor beside a channel is what is left after the pressure it found, and open a channel to see every field it read, as it is stored. How the model works

Security fields

67 55 of them feed a channel

Established

47 20 left unknown, 0 not applicable

Completeness

67% the share the model could weigh

Citations

59 across 11 documents

Every value carries what it rests on, and the model weighs the four levels differently. Weight, then how many citations on this record sit at that level:

A weighs 1.00 · 15 hereB weighs 0.85 · 32 hereC weighs 0.70 · 12 here

The weights are methodology.json’s own; a claim seen in the artefact itself counts for more than the same claim reported second-hand. The date at the end of a row is the day that value was last read.

A channel does not price every field it reads. The ones it did are marked along their edge and carry what they added; everything else was read and cost nothing. Only a channel that composes field by field can mark a field at all — the rest price themselves by the parameters printed above their rows.

Still open on this record.

The two prices, corrected. The page toggles Monthly/Yearly views of one Premium tier, each with its own intro rate. The prior record held the yearly renewal ($95.99/year) in U04b_price_yearly and that renewal divided by 12 ($7.99) in U04_price_monthly — neither described what either cycle actually charges.

What the toggle shows. Monthly: $1.99/mo first term, "Auto-renews monthly at $12.99/mo." Yearly: $29/year first term, "Auto-renews at $95.99/year." U04_price_monthly=1.99 and U04b_price_yearly=29 are the first-term charges; the two renewal rates are noted here, not fielded.

User scale. M08 (user scale) is unestablished: the one figure this pass found attached to an install/review count (915,719, from a 2017 Play Store screenshot inside the CDT complaint) is not clearly labelled as installs vs reviews, so it was not used to justify mass.

the rest of what is open — 170 more words

What no page carried. C02 (RAM-only), C06 (own DNS), C09b/C11's underlying jurisdiction chain past US, U02 (server-country list), U06 (censorship circumvention), U08 (kill-switch platform scope), U11 (signup friction) and the V12-V15 hygiene/verification block were not found on any page opened this pass.

A nine-year-old source. C07a and C12 rest on a 2017 Carnegie Mellon static-analysis table (via the CDT complaint) that has not been re-run against the current app — the ad SDK names (com.mopub, com.facebook, com.vungle, com.quantcast, com.adjust, com.tapit) and the MAC/IMEI collection they document are nine years old and may no longer describe the current build.

Why the old finding still counts. X04_owner_group_history is sourced to the same 2017 complaint, against AnchorFree, Inc. under its pre-2020 ownership; R11_evidence_voiding's code path only discounts audit-series bonuses and P01/P02/P03 disclosure decay for evidence predating M16_control_since — it does not gate X01/X02/X04, so this finding stands at full weight against the current owner rather than being discounted, which is a deliberate reading of the rule as implemented (see CASEBOOK), not an oversight.

On the record as a whole.

This record ports the shape of v1's Hotspot Shield entry (v1 sec 10 in hushfleet.com's contract-request-catalogue.md) but every field was re-verified against a primary source this session, per CLAUDE.md's port-is-not-copying rule; several values changed in the process (X01, X04, C12, U07, U01, pricing, ownership dates) because the v1 record either left them unsourced or used the older v1 vocabulary.

The 2023 Pango transparency report (pointwild.com, PDF, read directly at confidence A) is the primary source for the disclosure block: of 30 US government requests, 19 produced nothing and 11 produced only non-content data via subpoena (0 search warrants, 0 court orders, 1 emergency-disclosure request); of 52 international requests, 47 produced only non-content data; no content was disclosed in any of the 82 requests.

the rest of what is open — 648 more words

P02/P03/P12 record this as one aggregate 2023 event rather than a dated individual case, because the report itself is an annual rollup with no per-request dates.

The August 2023 Aon report (also read directly, confidence A) is a narrow engagement: one development VPN node, not the fleet, examined against exactly two claims from the privacy policy (no identity-linkable browsing record, no IP/device-identifier logging alongside browsing activity) - Aon found neither violated, but the definitional table it published lists diagnostic information (timestamps, referring URLs, approximate location) and bandwidth as routinely collected, which is session metadata, the value V11 records.

The Center for Democracy & Technology's 2017 FTC complaint against AnchorFree, Inc. (Hotspot Shield's then-operator) is the source for X01/X02/X04/C07a/C12. It quotes AnchorFree's own CEO ("we never log or store user data") and app-store copy ("No Logs Kept") directly against two documents of the company's own.

The first is the privacy policy, which admits automatic collection of IP address, device hash and "application information," against marketing that denied it. The second is a Carnegie Mellon static-analysis table showing six named third-party ad-network SDKs (MoPub, Facebook, Vungle, Quantcast, Adjust, Tapit) with READ_PHONE_STATE/ACCESS_WIFI_STATE permissions reaching MAC addresses and IMEI numbers - collection the app's own marketing directly denied.

AnchorFree disputed the complaint and no public FTC action followed, so this is documented, unadjudicated advocacy, not a regulatory finding; it is used here only for what it itself documents (the quotes and the CMU table), not for CDT's characterization of AnchorFree's intent.

Ownership: AnchorFree became Pango, was acquired by Aura on 2020-07-07 (aura.com press release, read directly), operated as a sister business unit of Aura from June 2021, separated from Aura in August 2024, and merged with Total Security in December 2024 to become Point Wild - all per Point Wild's own "our story" page.

IntegrityHas it been caught saying one thing and doing another?16 fields read · 6 left unknown · 81.9 points of pressure×0.181

What this channel priced on this record:Lie 0.6Monetisation 0.15Absolute claims 0.04Disclosure rate 0.2122Owner transparency 0.06Owner group history 0.25

User base scale (mass >=10M, mid >=1M, niche <1M)also read by silenceM08_user_scale

unknown

nothing published · recorded as asserted

Report a problem with M08_user_scale

Other businesses of the owner groupM10_owner_other_business

other

Cpointwild.com Cpointwild.com30 Aug 2026

Report a problem with M10_owner_other_business

Transparency reportalso read by ignorance, silenceP05_transparency_report

stale

Computed

×0.004 of a clean record completeness 67%

Where the drop comes from: Integrity. It is the channel this record's risk is concentrated in — on its own it takes a clean record to ×0.181, and its bar above is filled to that.

Exposure is recorded as medium and the integrity status as caught_lying.

Against the rest of the register, this record sits furthest above on Silence — ×1.000 where the register averages ×0.927 — and furthest below on Integrity, ×0.181 against ×0.658.

Published score

Every row above is one field of the published record, and every one of them can be challenged: every row carries Report, or raise something about the record as a whole. A correction with a source behind it is made the same day, and if it moves the score it moves the rank.

Specification

Carried, never scored

What changed

If this one is not right

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Where the security score comes from