[Infowarrior] - Which VPN Services Take Your Anonymity Seriously? 2016 Edition

[Richard Forno]

Which VPN Services Take Your Anonymity Seriously? 2016 Edition

	• By Ernesto
	• on February 20, 2016

VPN services have grown increasingly popular in recent years, but not all are completely anonymous. Some VPN services even keep extensive logs of users' IP-addresses for weeks. To find out which are the best VPNs, TorrentFreak asked several dozen providers about their logging policies, and more.

Millions of people use a VPN service to browse the Internet securely and anonymously. Unfortunately, however, not all VPN services are as anonymous as they claim to be and some keep extensive logs of private information.

To help VPN users to make an informed choice we decided to ask dozens of VPN services how they protect the privacy of their users. Today we present the fifth iteration of our annual VPN services “logging” review.

In addition to questions about logging policies we also asked VPN providers about various other privacy related issues.

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1. Do you keep ANY logs which would allow you to match an IP-address and a time stamp to a user of your service? If so, what information and for how long?

2. What is the registered name of the company and under what jurisdiction(s) does it operate?

3. Do you use any external visitor tracking, email providers or support tools that hold information of your users / visitors?

4. In the event you receive a takedown notice (DMCA or other), how are these handled?

5. What steps are taken when a valid court order or subpoena requires your company to identify an active user of your service? Has this ever happened?

6. Is BitTorrent and other file-sharing traffic allowed on all servers? If not, why?

7. Which payment systems do you use and how are these linked to individual user accounts?

8. What is the most secure VPN connection and encryption algorithm you would recommend to your users? Do you provide DNS leak protection and tools such as “kill switches” if a connection drops?

9. Do you offer a custom VPN application to your users? If so, for which platforms?

10. Do you use your own DNS servers?

11. Do you have physical control over your VPN servers and network or are they hosted by/accessible to a third party?

12. What countries are your servers located in?

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What follows is the list of responses from the VPN services, in their own words. Providers who didn’t answer our questions directly or failed by logging extensively were excluded. We specifically chose to leave room for detailed answers where needed. The order of the list holds no value.

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https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-anonymous-review-160220/

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