Perfect Privacy
A VPN service that caters to users for whom privacy is more important than price, streaming or speed
SCORE
PRICE €13 per month or €120 per year, from perfect-privacy.com
Many VPN services keep no logs, commission audits and publish transparency reports. Perfect Privacy has had its no-logging credentials backed up by a real-life police raid.
When two of the Swiss company’s servers were seized by Dutch police in 2016, no identifying information was on them to be compromised. Rivals ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access once held similar status, but as these have subsequently been bought by holding company Kape Technologies, we’ve no choice but to reset the clock on that front.
To add to Perfect Privacy’s rock-solid security credentials, it has used RAMdisk servers for years. Its features include a multi-hop option to connect a chain of four VPN tunnels to help obfuscate your endpoint location, a “stealth” mode designed to foil VPN detection through deep packet inspection, tracker blocking, full
IPv6 support, and a kill switch to stop data from being sent or received if your connection to the VPN drops. Clients are available for Windows, Android, Linux and macOS, with manual connection instructions for everything else.
While many services have adopted the WireGuard protocol as part of their efforts to improve speeds, Perfect Privacy has not, as it doesn’t yet believe that it can mesh with its existing features and security requirements. It also includes an unusual feature called “NeuroRouting”, which uses a neural network to analyse optimal routing to any given destination IP address to minimise the number of hops that take place outside its network.
Despite this, its speed test results are consistently less than half that of the average for the group, at 92Mbits/sec download speeds using its UK endpoint, 94Mbits/sec via the Netherlands, and a painfully slow 9.6Mbits/sec from the US. Don’t expect to be able to stream any video services that carry out more than the most rudimentary geolocation checking, either.
The service is expensive, but note that it lets you connect an unlimited number of devices using a single account. If a single-focused obsession with security is what you need from a VPN provider, Perfect Privacy comes as close as anyone in the industry.