HotSpot Shield has impressive speeds, good pricing, and a good number of country locations-though not a particularly exhaustive list. The company’s privacy policies make it clear that you’re browsing habits are tracked-albeit in aggregate form. But if your concern is to encrypt your web browsing so you can surf safely from anywhere, HotSpot Shield does that. AnchorFreeīased on HotSpot Shield’s privacy policy it’s safe to say this is not the service for high-level anonymity online. That has nothing to do with HotSpot Shield Premium, but it’s a good reminder of why you don’t want to use an ad-supported service when trying to get online unnoticed. If you use the free, ad-supported version you may also leak personally identifying information to HotSpot Shield advertisers. Again this information is never associated with you and is used for analytics and troubleshooting. The company also gathers device information like your hardware model, OS version, browser type, language, wireless network, and mobile network information. The report states that AnchorFree does not and “cannot provide information to governments about what websites our users visit when using our services….To date, AnchorFree has never provided the identity or other personal information regarding our users to the government.” That said the company published its first transparency report in November 2017. That might not bother some users, but those who are very privacy conscious should look elsewhere. But that doesn’t negate the fact that your browsing data is still collected by AnchorFree. AnchorFree says it doesn’t store your IP address long term.īut it does “collect anonymous aggregate data about which websites you visit and which apps you use.” AnchorFree says it does this for analytics and troubleshooting, and this information is never connected to any of your identifying information such as an email address, home IP address, username, and so on. There is no ability for anonymous or semi-anonymous payment forms like Bitcoin or cash.Įven if you could pay anonymously with HotSpot Shield you probably wouldn’t want to once you looked at the service’s privacy policy-there’s a lot in there not to like if you’re privacy conscious. For payments, it only takes standard options of credit cards and PayPal. When you first sign up for the service, it asks for an email address and a password, which is pretty standard for mainstream VPN services. Its CEO is David Gorodyanksy and the CTO is Eugene Malobrodsky-they are also the company’s co-founders. headquarters are located at 1800 Seaport Blvd., Redwood City, CA 94063. Privacy, anonymity, and trust AnchorFreeĪnchorFree’s U.S. I asked AnchorFree about this and the company said it does use virtual server locations, where the physical machine may be in one location but looks like it’s in another.Īs always, take these speed tests with a grain of salt-as you should with any VPN speed test-because your experience may vary.

The elapsed time was 13.612 milliseconds, which is impossible and strongly suggests that the server I was using was serving an American IP from central Europe.

The day Netflix thought I was in Germany, I did manage to get one successful traceroute from a supposed connection in California to Vienna, Austria. Given this odd combination I tried running some ping and traceroute tests, but most of them timed out. HotSpot Shield did give me a few DNS servers in Germany that day, which likely contributed to Netflix’s confusion.

servers, for example, I got an American IP but Google thought I was in the UK-thus it redirected my browser to .uk-and Netflix thought I was in Germany. The first time I connected to HotSpot Shield’s U.S.

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