The question sounds simple, but the answer depends on what you mean by safety. Let's break it into three parts: what encryption protects, what it doesn't do, and what depends on the service itself.
The short answer
Technically, a VPN is safe: it encrypts the channel between your device and the server. But it shifts trust — instead of your internet provider, the VPN service now sees your traffic. So the question "is it safe?" turns into "who do you trust?"
What a VPN protects you from
- Interception on someone else's network. On open Wi-Fi in a café or hotel, nearby devices and the hotspot owner won't see the contents of your traffic.
- Monitoring by your provider. Your carrier sees an encrypted connection to a single address, not a list of the sites you've visited.
- Being located by your IP. Websites see the server's address.
- DNS spoofing at the provider level — provided that DNS requests go through the tunnel.
What it doesn't protect you from
- Viruses and malicious files. A VPN doesn't inspect content; it encrypts the channel. A file you've downloaded and run stays exactly what it was.
- Phishing. A fake website is still fake through any server.
- Tracking through your accounts. Once you've logged in, you're recognized regardless of your IP.
- Browser fingerprinting. Your set of fonts, screen resolution, language and version — this combination identifies you even without an IP.
- Whatever you type into a website yourself.
The main question: who you're handing your trust to
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Without a VPN, your provider sees your traffic. With a VPN, it's the service you pay. In principle, it is able to see which addresses you connect to. That's why choosing the service matters more than choosing the protocol.
What to look at:
- Whether the service has a legal entity, an address and company details, or is anonymous.
- What the privacy policy says: a specific list of the data being processed, or vague generalities.
- Whether what the website promises matches what the legal documents say.
Why free VPNs are a separate story
Infrastructure costs money. If the user doesn't pay, the revenue comes from somewhere else: showing ads, selling anonymized statistics, and in the worst cases reselling users' traffic. That doesn't mean every free service is bad, but the question "how does it make money?" is a must here, and the answer should be public.
How things stand at VolnaLink
We've described on a separate page which data is processed and which is not collected: the history of visited sites, traffic contents and DNS requests are not on that list. The service is provided by VolnaApp LLP, and the company's details are published. The trial period is 8 hours without a card; after that the service is paid, and that is our source of revenue.