Guardian firewall & VPN
Protect your iOS from hidden trackers
$9.99/month; $99.99/year (one month promo code supplied for review) From Sudo Security Group, guardianapp.com Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 11 or later
Privacy and security is always a hot topic, but these days it seems everyone wants a piece of you. Guardian describes itself as “the first real firewall for iOS”. Its primary function is to root out those hidden trackers lurking on websites and in apps that spy on your activities, blocking them and alerting you to the fact.
Guardian employs the use of a VPN to provide its filtering capabilities. Once switched on, your web traffic is encrypted and hidden from potential snooping on unsecured Wi-Fi networks. What’s more, it travels through Guardian’s local VPN server, which scans it for potential issues — not just trackers, but also phishing, malware, and aggressive advertising. (The sort that throws up full-page popups that force you to click a link to visit the offending website before you can carry on browsing.) All of this it promises to filter out.
The app uses iOS’s built–in VPN API — IPsec/IKEv2 — and industry standard AES–256 encryption to protect and anonymize your data. It’s very simple to use: fire it up, click the big button, and you should see the VPN symbol appear in
the status bar, indicating you’re protected. During our extensive testing we saw no noticeable drop in browsing speeds or drain on the battery, so there’s no additional price to pay for protection.
There are — as yet — no configuration options. When enabled, tap Alerts to see what it’s successfully blocked. You can gain a little more information about a specific tracking alert by tapping it, but for now that’s it. The lack of configuration means the app is currently quite conservative when it comes to blocking trackers to prevent too many apps breaking when the Guardian firewall is enabled. The developers promise to add options for whitelisting trusted apps in a future release, at which point it promises to be more aggressive in which trackers it blocks.
A free version provides a low–speed VPN, which switches itself off after a set period, and the ability to review (but not block) alerts. Subscribing unlocks full protection and functionality, plus leaves the VPN permanently switched on. It does, however, feel a little pricey at $9.99 a month in its current state.
The theory behind Guardian is admirable, and what little it currently does it does well. We’d appreciate more transparency in key areas, though. It promises that it’s not interested in tracking your data itself and that no personally identifiable information is transmitted through its VPN servers, for example, but that must be taken on trust for now.
There’s also a lot of room for improvement, and we suspect over the coming months the app will evolve considerably. Let’s hope so, because the lack of control and the fact its own VPN services are limited compared to other providers (no choice of server locations, for example) count against it.
THE BOTTOM LINE. A good start but feels unfinished and needs to evolve quickly to justify its price.