Perfect Privacy VPN

Verdict

Perfect Privacy isn’t as fast as other VPNs, but it’s packed with security features and has been shown to genuinely keep no connection logs, making it one of the most secure options.

Introduction

Perfect Privacy is a VPN that has a clear focus on security, with low speeds making it a poor option for the likes of video streaming.

Perfect Privacy’s proven stability and proven no-logging record ensure that it’s an excellent choice for VPN users with specific, privacy-oriented applications in mind.

If you’re looking for speed, however, then you should go elsewhere.

Pricing and subscriptions

Perfect Privacy is one of the most expensive VPN services around, priced at $12.99/£10.58 per month, $119.99/£97.72 per year, $214.95/£175.06 per two years.

Even its most economical two-year subscription works out at $8.95/£7.29 per month, which is more than many rivals’ monthly subscriptions.

Privacy and Protection

• Proven no-logging policy
• Transparent about court orders and warrants

The Swiss company behind Perfect Privacy is one of very few virtual private network providers that’s been shown to have a genuine commitment to its no-logging policy. When Dutch police seized two of its servers in 2016, no logs were found.

Like many of its rivals, Perfect Privacy publishes a warrant canary to notify users of any court orders or warrants. The service is subject to Swiss law, which does honour international warrants, but recently found that VPN services and other over-the-top service providers shouldn’t be subject to enhanced logging requirements.

Features and Usability

• Has endpoints in 26 different countries
• One of the best collection of security features

Perfect Privacy provides a wide range of apps and connection instructions for every device you need to protect, even though the interfaces aren’t always glossy as some rivals, and iOS users might have to do a bit more manual configuration than they’re used to.

The desktop apps present a simple list of its endpoint server locations across 26 countries, with a button next to each entry that allows you to connect and disconnect from each one. Each server’s maximum bandwidth is listed alongside and, once you’ve connected to Perfect Privacy’s network, you can see how much of that is currently being consumed.

Whether or not you’re currently connected, you can ping all the servers for their response times, and these two bits of information offer a fair predictor of the performance you can expect from each endpoint location.

The service has very flexible kill switch settings to help ensure that you don’t accidentally send any traffic along unencrypted routes if the VPN connection goes down. By default, the kill switch is only active when you connect the VPN, but you can also set it to be active either whenever Perfect Privacy’s client is open, or permanently, which is a major advantage for people for whom privacy is of critical importance.

Other advanced settings allow you to use “cascading” Multi-Hop connections involving multiple VPN endpoints, a Stealth VPN mode to attempt to conceal the fact that you’re using a VPN at all – useful in countries where their use is restricted by law.

There’s NeuroRouting, which is designed to optimise performance by dynamically calculating the fastest route to get data to and from your desired online location, plus protection against malware, trackers and other online irritants.

You’ll also find more typical advanced options that allow you to select connection and encryption protocols.

Performance

• Significantly slower than group test average
• Not a good option for streaming TV

Perfect Privacy has consistently produced some of the slowest download speeds of any service in my benchmark tests over several years, and this latest round was no exception. However, you’ll get a perfectly good browsing experience if you’re connecting to Europe, and performance when connecting to a US endpoint has improved to the point of being able to stream 1080p video without any major fuss.

I caught Perfect Privacy on a bad day, in which even UK speeds barely exceeded 31 Mbps. It’s done better in other tests, but has never come anywhere close to the average.

If you have a fast internet connection, you’ll notice a severe drop in download speeds. If you’re not trying to shift gigabytes of data quickly, performance via the UK is still good enough for most purposes, but Perfect Privacy isn’t primarily designed for entertainment-oriented uses. Don’t expect to be able to stream TV undetected while you’re connected.

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