Microsoft Defender ditches privacy protection feature, leaving users without VPN
Millions of people who relied on Microsoft Defender’s privacy protection to hide their IP addresses should look for alternative VPN providers. The tech giant will end support for the feature on February 28th, 2025, less than six months after it was made available on Windows.
Image by Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters
Millions of people who relied on Microsoft Defender’s privacy protection to hide their IP addresses should look for alternative VPN providers. The tech giant will end support for the feature on February 28th, 2025, less than six months after it was made available on Windows.
Microsoft added a VPN layer to Defender to protect people from unsafe internet connections such as public WiFi hotspots.
It was first available on Android, but in September 2024 Microsoft expanded the feature to work on multiple platforms. Privacy protection creates a VPN connection between the device and Microsoft’s servers, hides the IP address, and encrypts the traffic, protecting users on unsafe networks.
From the beginning, it was a limited 50GB of monthly traffic offering, excluding high-bandwidth services such as streaming or social media. The feature was included with Microsoft 365, a service that had 82.5 million consumer subscribers at the end of 2024.
“The privacy protection (VPN) feature within Defender is going away February 28th, 2025,” Microsoft said in a recent announcement.
The Redmond giant explains that it routinely evaluates the features' usage and effectiveness and, instead of privacy protection, “will invest in new areas that will better align to customer needs.”
Privacy protection is currently available to Microsoft Defender users with Microsoft 365 subscribers in the US, UK, Canada, and multiple other countries. The support page wasn’t updated and still states that they’ll “continue to add support for additional countries.”
Microsoft assures that Defender continues to provide data and device protection, identity theft, and credit monitoring (in the US only), and alerts when it detects threats online. No other features are being sunsetted.
While users of Windows, iOS, and macOS do not need to do anything, the Defender app on Android requires user action to remove the VPN profile from the device.
Leaving the profile ‘will not cause any impact to your device, but it’s recommended to remove it as it won’t be used by Defender to provide protection.’ This can be done in settings by searching VPN.
“If you’ve onboarded to privacy protection, you should see a ‘Microsoft Defender’ VPN profile in the list of VPN profiles. Use the info icon to tap on it and remove it,” Microsoft explains.
Microsoft recently brought AI assistant Copilot and hiked the price of Microsoft 365 by an additional $3 per month, bringing the cost of the Personal plan to $10 per month (or $100 annually) and the Family plan to $13 per month (or $130 annually).