Apple / utilities / AVAST SECURELINE VPN PROXY
REVIEW
Avast SecureLine VPN works fine. Avast still has a Jumpshot problem.
The VPN itself is competent — solid speeds, modern protocols, Apple-respectful interface. The owner is the company that, until 2020, sold its users' browsing data to advertisers.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 8, 2026 · 5 MIN READ
Avast Secureline VPN Proxy
AVAST SOFTWARE S.R.O
OUR SCORE
6.5
APPLE
★ 4.7
PRICE
Free
A VPN is the rare consumer product where the company’s institutional history matters more than the software. The encryption maths is the same across providers. The server architecture is mostly the same. The reason you pay one VPN and not another is whether you trust the entity reading the connection logs they swore they don’t keep.
Avast’s institutional history is, by the standards of the privacy industry, complicated. Until 2020, the parent company collected every URL its free-Antivirus users visited and sold the data through a subsidiary called Jumpshot. Mozilla pulled the browser extensions. The US FTC fined Avast $16.5M in 2024 over the practice. Avast publicly buried the programme; SecureLine VPN runs under a different privacy policy; the FTC settlement is closed. None of which is exactly the kind of background a privacy product wants on its CV.
The software itself is fine. SecureLine is fast, the iOS app is well-built, the kill-switch works as advertised, and the bundle pricing inside Avast/Norton makes sense if you already pay for either. The problem is what happens when a privacy product’s parent company has, within recent memory, sold its customers’ browsing data. That’s not a technical problem the engineers can fix; it’s an institutional trust problem the brand has inherited. Independent VPNs that have nothing to apologise for cost about the same and have submitted to public audits. Most privacy-conscious users should buy one of those instead.
A privacy product is only as private as the company that runs it. Avast's company has sold its users' browsing data within living memory.
FEATURES
Avast SecureLine VPN is a paid consumer VPN bundled into Avast's broader security stack and now operating under Gen Digital, the post-2022 holding company that also owns Norton, Avira, AVG, and LifeLock. On iOS the app provides one-tap connect, a server picker across ~36 countries, kill-switch, split-tunneling on supported routes, and the modern protocol stack (WireGuard plus OpenVPN as fallback).
Pricing is $4.59/month annual ($55.08 first year, ~$70/year after the intro), $5.99/month with the multi-device family plan. There's no free tier — only a 7-day trial. The subscription unlocks five simultaneous device connections across iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Where SecureLine differs from independent VPNs (Mullvad, ProtonVPN, IVPN) is integration with the rest of the Avast/Norton stack. If you already pay for Avast Antivirus, the SecureLine bundle is materially cheaper than buying a standalone VPN. If you don't, there's no reason to start with SecureLine over a privacy-first competitor.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Speed and reliability are not the issue. SecureLine on a 1Gbps fibre connection in Western Europe lands somewhere around 800Mbps over WireGuard to a same-country exit, which is competitive with NordVPN and ExpressVPN in the same conditions. The kill-switch is implemented correctly. The auto-connect-on-untrusted-WiFi setting works.
The iOS app respects iOS conventions. There's a Shortcut for connecting on demand, the widget is functional, and the menu bar icon on Mac doesn't try to upsell you mid-session. For a product owned by a security-suite vendor, the absence of nag dialogs is a meaningful achievement.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
In 2019, Mozilla and Opera removed Avast's browser extensions from their stores after researchers showed Avast's free Antivirus was funnelling user browsing data — every URL visited, every search — to a subsidiary called Jumpshot, which sold it to Microsoft, Google, Pepsi, McKinsey, and others. Avast publicly killed Jumpshot in early 2020. In February 2024, the US FTC fined Avast $16.5M and ordered them to delete the data. None of that history applies to SecureLine specifically — SecureLine is sold under a separate privacy policy — but the parent company's track record on customer data is the historical record, and a privacy product cannot be evaluated separately from the company that runs it.
The 2022 Gen Digital merger placed Avast under US jurisdiction (Five Eyes), which independent VPNs treat as a reason to incorporate elsewhere. Avast SecureLine has not commissioned an independent audit of its no-logs claim — Mullvad, ProtonVPN, IVPN, and ExpressVPN all have. For a $55/year product in 2026, that's a cost-to-trust ratio that doesn't compete.
CONCLUSION
Use Avast SecureLine VPN if you already subscribe to Avast or Norton's security suite and want unified billing — the bundle math works in that case. Use it if your VPN need is "Wi-Fi at hotels and airports" and not "active threat model". For anything more — journalism, activism, sensitive research, or just a strong personal privacy preference — Mullvad and ProtonVPN are better choices and not significantly more expensive.