Hey! We are now reviewing VPNs based on how much trust you can have in VPN providers when it comes to handling your personal data.
To do this properly, we read the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to spot any red and yellow flags (there are so many!). We also reviewed the parent company’s history, marketing practices, transparency in communications, past controversies, and a lot more related factors. Our goal was to create the most comprehensive evaluation we could for each provider.
This project took 8 months to complete and took a lot of reading and interpretating hours! And yes, all that to confirm that the top choices for VPNs when focusing on privacy are Mullvad and IVPN, just like Privacy Guides recommends. ProtonVPN and Windscribe are also in the Top 4 for us.
We made a video explaining the methodology and highlighting the most surprising findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-i_BB2uFYYA
If you want to see all information we reviewed to score a given VPN, you can see all of our research notes in their review like this one for Mullvad: Mullvad Review - RTINGS.com
The biggest takeaway was that even though VPN are supposed to be “privacy products” with their “no-logs” policies, most VPNs outright tell you in their Privacy Policy that they will be sharing your personal information within their organization or with third parties sometimes without clear details on what information is collected… and some of those organizations are getting quite oligopolistic meaning your info might be getting around a lot!
I know most people on this forum already follows recommendations of Privacy Guides for their VPNs. I’m hoping these resources can help steer friends or family away from less privacy-friendly VPNs like Nord or Express.
Hey Rtings, just wanted to take some time to commend you on actually putting in the legwork to understand how VPNs work, such as researching the technical work/legalese involved and reaching out to experts. Most places would never bother with the level of effort you have put into this.
Thanks for trying to be a proper and methodical resource. It’s increasingly rare these days
I would personally love to do this for all companies we covered, but it’s a tough sell since it’s a big time investment! The more traction this project gets, the easier we can make it happen for other companies!
On a side note, there was the ToS Hawk project that was trying to leverage AI to review privacy policies of all companies: TosHawk - Transparency Made Simple. I had a quick chat with the developer. He put the project on ice for now since there weren’t enough people interested. I’m hoping he’ll pick it up again!
I too am a Mullvad VPN user, it really is great.
However recently, I have been very much intrigued by the Obscura VPN and their two VPN provider multi-hop thing, it really is cool, you get the exit node from the best - Mullvad (Obscura has an officiall partnership with Mullvad for this) while the entry node is of Obscura VPN which essentially makes that no one party knows it all.
This is how it works ACCORDING TO THEM.
Would love to know your thoughts on Obscura VPN compared to Mullvad VPN. Is there any real benefit to it and how much does it matter and like other things?
PS: I do understand the limitation of Obscura VPN only being available for MacOS and iOS and have no plans on switching from Mullvad to Obscura any time soon. Do Note, I meant Client only being available for these two platform, although you can use / connect with wireguard on other platforms if you wish and know how to.
I haven’t looked deeply into Obscura yet so I prefer not to comment uninformed. I know @obscuracarl is lurking here if you want his direct input.
Obscura is most likely a VPN we will be testing in our next batch since we keep getting ask about it. I’m not sure when this is happening though. This is a business decision a bit outside of my power. However, the more people ask for it, the faster it will happen!
If you do, do note that you can’t buy anonymously but only renew. To me that’s odd; but acquiring access to it is not as private as others or the service itself may be. A little ironic.
I would be interested in vp.net for your next batch as well. I find their hardware proofs interesting, but just am not convinced by them and they seem scummy in other parts.
since the average user might just glance over this page without paying attention to the small details thinking that the situation is awful with every VPN, especially given the fact that it directly conflicts with a different result on Mullvad’s review page itself
We don’t test Port Forwarding at the moment, which is why it isn’t affecting the score. This is the next test we will be adding to our review, so at that point, Mullvad, IVPN and Proton Free will be taking big hits to their torrenting capabilities since they don’t support that feature. Windscribe has the feature, but you need to pay a little extra to have a dedicated IP address (that is shared in a small pool, so still not directly attached to a specific account).
This is due to how we choose to work, which is by iteratively adding a few tests every release instead of trying to make the review complete. This work method does have its flaws of course, but it lets us react better to user feedback, like what you just did.
I wonder if it’s not worth updating those metrics with the updated values directly
Oh! You have a good point here! We have disclaimer in place saying that the screenshot is showing the old data. If you missed it, it means it might not be clear enough. I’ll see what we can do about it! Thanks!
What is the best P2P client aka qbitorrent vs transmission vs deluge etc…
I like the idea, but it is not a thing we normally do. VPN are the first software product we test, which is already going a bit off our beaten path. I’ll see if we can have a special, one-time investigation for this which would output an article instead of having a normal review page (which we need to maintain at every release so we don’t want to overextend our capacity!)
Our next step for VPN is most likely to test Port Forwarding, and we want to test the feature out and not just have a Yes/No field… so since we will be playing in Torrent territory, we might be able to text P2P clients as all. No promises here, I’m just excited to see if we can make this happen!
Haha, as said in my initial message I did not miss it (as shown by the green arrows) but it is an easy thing to actually miss indeed. Thanks for considering an update!
I understand the limited bandwidth and need to stay focused on a given goal, but thanks for considering the idea!
