Well they should be at least "relatively secure", i.e. you can hide your traffic from your government, but not from Microsoft. Then if government has some reasons to spy you, they will go to Microsoft and depending on country they will receive what they want. So yes, It's not safe for some really dangerous countries like Russia, where you may get huge problems with police just because you posted some funny picture in social networks
By the way your example about translator may not be a direct proof of VPN insecurity, you may get locked because lot of people using the same VPN servers (same server IP-addresses), so Google blocks those IPs because of reaching limits.
Anyway I personally don't like any VPNs, especially free (as they in most cases trading your data), using TOR should be much better variant.
Can use Tor Browser for high security, or using things like FoxyProxy browser extension + local TOR proxy for some generic anonymity.
Surely if going to be more paranoid (or secure), there are more complex ways, like using chains of different VPNs to connect TOR or (TOR to connect VPN
) and so on, but that's another story.
