Selecting a good VPN
TECHLIFE’S EDITOR EXPLAINS WHAT YOU NEED TO CONSIDER WHEN CHOOSING A VPN SERVICE PROVIDER.
AUSTRALIA’S CONTROVERSIAL METADATA retention laws are now in full effect, meaning your ISP (and your phone-service provider) is obliged to collect and store certain pieces of information regarding your digital communications — including things like who you’ve sent messages to (both email and SMS) and what websites you’ve visited. That data will be kept for two years and can be accessed by approved government agencies without a warrant.
The new laws have seen a surge in demand for virtual private network (VPN) subscriptions in Australia, which protect you from this dragnet approach to metadata collection by cloaking all your online activities — when you’re connected to a VPN, all your internet traffic is first routed through your VPN provider’s external network — effectively meaning that only your VPN provider knows what sites and services you’re connecting too.
But with hundreds of options available, finding a VPN that’s actually good can be a tough task. If you’re primarily concerned about privacy, picking an overseas-based provider is a fairly safe first step. Once you’ve got some on your shortlist, we’d recommend checking the rather exhaustive chart at That One Privacy Site ( thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparisonchart), that includes a rundown of where each VPN is headquartered, what logging laws it complies with and even some limited speed-testing.
The problem with overseas-based VPNs — even the ones that lease local Australian server infrastructure through which to route traffic (which theoretically gives users faster overall speeds) — suffer from wildly varying performance. That can happen if a VPN becomes too popular and doesn’t back that up by adding more servers and bandwidth. It’s a problem we’ve seen arise first-hand in our own testing, and as such, we’d suggest not signing up for extended plans and sticking with month-to-month subscriptions — unless, of course, you’re happy to accept the risk to save a few bucks. Regardless, before choosing a VPN, you should always sign up for a free trial (most offer around seven days) and, during that period, frequently test your speeds using Speedtest.net.
If you want to go with an Aussie company, which can help guarantee speeds and service, you need to be a bit more wary. There’s still some question over whether VPN operators in Australia need to comply with the metadata retention laws — and different companies take different stances. A literal reading of the laws seems to imply that only “carriers or carriage service providers” — ie. ISPs — need to collect metadata, and as such, some VPN providers don’t, but some do... so be sure to double-check before signing any contracts.