Perfect Privacy Review

Here’s a table summarizing the information that Perfect Privacy logs:

Perfect Privacy is one of the best VPNs for Privacy. It doesn’t log any user information.

That means no browsing history, no IP addresses, no VPN connection timestamps, and no individual bandwidth usage.

This was proved in 2016 when Dutch authorities seized two of Perfect Privacy’s Rotterdam servers. During this incident was confirmed that “no customer information was compromised”.

Perfect Privacy provides an additional layer of transparency by publishing a regular warrant canary.

This details the number of data requests the VPN has received from government agencies, and how many it has complied with.

Who Owns Perfect Privacy?

Perfect Privacy was created in 2008, but there’s limited information available about who founded the company.

Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company, is listed as the party responsible for processing data on its websites. Steffen Wernéry, a member of the German Association for Data Protection and Data Security, is listed as the protection office.

Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company is Swiss and Wernéry is German.

There’s also mention of a Panama-based company Webinvest International SA, which is behind Perfect Privacy’s ‘technical implementation.’

An email from customer support confirmed that “when it comes to enquiries from authorities regarding the VPN, Panama is normally responsible.

Panama and Switzerland are both considered a privacy haven, removed from international data-sharing nations like the Five-Eyes and the EU.

We tested Perfect Privacy’s speed performance by recording the speed of the connection between our location and Perfect Privacy servers around the globe.

Here’s a table showing Perfect Privacy’s speed test results, in full:

When connected to servers near our physical location (New York) Perfect Privacy performed well, with only a 13% drop in download speed. Strangely, we found the fastest speeds when connecting to the Canada server with a 8% drop.

Further afield we recorded an average decrease of 35% in Germany, which isn’t noticeable for most users, but if you have more performance-heavy needs, like for torrenting or gaming, you’ll need better speeds.

Although these speeds are serviceable, there are much faster VPNs than Perfect Privacy available. NordVPN is faster than Perfect Privacy in every location we test, with an average international download speed of 86Mbps compared to Perfect Privacy’s 79Mbps.

You can use the chart below to see how Perfect Privacy’s international speeds compare against top-rated VPNs:

As the chart above shows, Perfect Privacy fails to compete with the fastest VPN services. To rectify this, we’d like to see Perfect Privacy implement the faster and less outdated WireGuard protocol — instead of relying on OpenVPN. Moreover, we’d welcome an increase in the number of server locations the VPN offers to mitigate its poor international speed performance.

Here are the results of our streaming tests when using Perfect Privacy:

Perfect Privacy clearly favours privacy and security over streaming.

The Android app was incapable of consistently unlocking any streaming services.

The Windows version is even less reliable as the London server bizarrely gave us German and Turkish IP addresses.

Even when successfully connected to a London IP, we encountered further problems with Perfect Privacy’s ‘TrackStop’ filters sometimes blocking our attempts to access BBC iPlayer’s homepage on desktop.

We found Netflix to be blocked on all US servers, across all versions of Perfect Privacy. This is true for many similar free services, including VPNBook.

Other major streaming services didn’t fare any better, with Perfect privacy failing to unlock Amazon Prime video, Disney + and HBO Max.

If you’re looking to stream content, we cannot recommend this VPN.

Here’s an overview showing how Perfect Privacy performed in our torrenting tests:

P2P traffic is permitted on 75% of Perfect Privacy’s servers, which is a healthy majority – but it does exclude all five American servers.

American users may find their speeds subpar – the nearest P2P server is in Canada.

To test Perfect Privacy’s file-sharing speeds, we connected to a local VPN server and downloaded a 1GB test file.

We used port forwarding to maximise Perfect Privacy’s P2P speeds.

We recorded an impressive average bitrate of 8.3MiB/s with Perfect Privacy. This is a great result and more than fast enough for most file types, but it is still slower than the best torrenting VPNs.

Port Forwarding Tool

Previously, Perfect privacy limited automatic port forwarding to its Windows app, but this has since been addressed.

You can now enable automatic or manual port forwarding in either of Perfect Privacy’s desktop apps. To access this feature, switch to the “Advanced” or “Expert” view in the top-left of the dashboard.

During our testing, we found port forwarding easy to set up and saw an immediate improvement in our file-sharing speeds.

We’re particularly impressed by Perfect Privacy’s adoption of this feature when many top-rated VPNs, such as NordVPN, are yet to include it.

Effective Kill Switch & Private Logging Policy

Perfect Privacy’s kill switch automatically blocked our network traffic, following a VPN disconnect.

This successfully blocked our real IP address from leaking to the rest of the torrent swarm and any onlookers.

Combined with a no-logs policy, Perfect Privacy is great for anonymous torrenting.

Perfect Privacy comes with the right tool for bypassing censorship in China: a stealth protocol.

However, customer support told us that it doesn’t always work to get past the Great Firewall.

It’s a tricky situation – Chinese censors have gotten very good at spotting and blocking VPN traffic.

In our own testing we haven’t been able to bypass the Firewall, although this was made worse by Perfect Privacy’s only Tokyo server being under maintenance.

Perfect Privacy is one of the most configurable VPNs we’ve tested; it does the basics very well and provides loads of advanced features for more experienced users.

The apps use two of the most secure VPN protocols available: OpenVPN and IKEv2/IPSec. OpenVPN has a slight edge as it’s open-source, but IKEv2/IPSec is still considered very safe.

There’s several encryption cipher options available within the app, but we recommend using AES-256 as this is the industry gold standard and practically unbreakable.

It has yet to adopt WireGuard, though.

Perfect Privacy comes with loads of different settings to play with for the ultimate configurability but let’s start with the basics.

It has a VPN kill switch. This is an essential feature, which blocks your internet traffic in case of an unexpected VPN disconnection.

What sets Perfect Privacy out from its competitors is the level of customization that comes with its kill switch. Beginners may prefer the ‘first stage’ which simply deactivates the kill switch every time you disconnect from the VPN server. For veteran users, the second tier will keep the firewall on for as long as the VPN client is running, and the third tier keeps the kill switch active 24/7.

This is a neat feature and lets you further customise Perfect Privacy’s service to your needs.

Perfect Privacy also comes with DNS leak protection and supports IPv6 traffic, which is an uncommon but very welcome addition.

Here’s the results of our leak test to prove that Perfect Privacy didn’t let any of our information leave the VPN tunnel:

Here are Perfect Privacy’s leak test results. We test from the UK and you can see that there are no IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks.

Perfect Privacy’s flagship AI program ‘NeuroRouting’ continually analyses your web traffic to work out the fastest possible route to your desired website.

This keeps your web traffic encrypted for as long as possible, with NeuroRouting ensuring that your final destination is at a VPN server as close as possible to the website you’re visiting. For longer connections this may even include hopping through multiple VPN servers which NeuroRouting carries out automatically.

A shortened tunnel ensures that there are less access points for attack and the cascading connection makes you harder to track. This feature is not intended to increase your internet speeds.

Although we have no way of testing this feature, it is certainly a welcome bonus which adds an extra layer of security to your web traffic. It isn’t helpful in all contexts; we recommend torrenters or those looking to connect to a specific server disable NeuroRouting.

Perfect Privacy allows for port forwarding, which is useful for gaming and torrenting. It’s also included in the price of every subscription, rather than a paid extra like with so many other VPNs.

The VPN service also has Multi-Hop VPN, which routes traffic through multiple servers before it reaches the website or service you want to access. This feature can increase privacy, overcome harsh censorship, and prevent some online tracking.

Speaking of tracking, Perfect Privacy also has a feature called TrackStop, which provides protection against tracking cookies, certain types of malware, phishing sites, and more. This feature has to be activated from your account on Perfect Privacy’s website, though, not through the app.

We found TrackStop to be a little hit-and-miss in our testing with the ‘fake news’, social media, and ad filters working as intended, but the child protection filter allowing us to access numerous gambling sites.

The Android app doesn’t include the option of multi-hop or kill switch, but the TrackStop filters will be applied once they’re activated through the website.

You can reach Perfect Privacy’s customer support in the following ways:

Perfect Privacy isn’t as polished as the top VPNs we’ve tested, but it’s still fairly good.

Admittedly, there’s no live chat support so you won’t be able to get instant answers to your questions.

There is email support – you have to fill in a form – and the replies are quite regular. It took half a day to receive a response to our first ticket but our second one received a reply within minutes.

The support agents were excellent, providing accurate answers which fully addressed our queries.

Perfect Privacy also has loads of online resources, including in-depth FAQs, useful setup guides, and a community forum.