McAfee Safe Connect Review

Here is the information as it appears in the McAfee privacy policy:

McAfee retains this information indefinitely, only removing it in the event of an account deletion. Even then, the data is still kept for 30 days.

McAfee also provides this information to other companies owned by McAfee, third-party advertisers, and “service providers who perform services for us.”

Peculiarly, McAfee Safe Connect shares its privacy policy with the broader McAfee cybersecurity product and the policy does not mention the Safe Connect VPN anywhere.

After we contacted McAfee, a representative did indeed confirm that Safe Connect is governed by the same rules and standards as all other McAfee products.

McAfee claims that this information is required “to help protect” users and “to run [McAfee’s] business”.

This is simply a lie. There are an abundance of VPN services who protect their users and run their business without engaging in such intrusive data collection.

US Ownership is problematic

McAfee Safe Connect is owned by McAfee LLC, the cyber security juggernaut. McAfee LLC also owns TunnelBear VPN (see our review), which it acquired in 2018.

Like its parent company, McAfee Safe Connect is based in the US, within Silicon Valley. As such, McAfee’s jurisdiction really could not be much worse. The US is a downright awful location to base a VPN service.

The US is part of the Five-Eyes intelligence alliance, meaning it shares surveillance data with the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

On top of this, McAfee is subject to the intrusive legal policies of the US, such as the infamous PRISM surveillance program, which allows the US government to surveil online communications from US-based technology companies.

More worrying, though, is the Stored Communications Act (SCA). This law grants the US government the ability to seize a VPN user’s information if that information has been retained.

This is particularly concerning with Safe Connect, as McAfee logs almost everything.

Moreover, McAfee’s privacy policy explicitly states that it will supply information to any legal, governmental, or judicial authority if it is ever requested.

In summary, McAfee Safe Connect VPN is bad for user privacy. To see the benefits of a trusted no-logs VPN, head over to our review of Private Internet Access.

McAfee Safe Connect delivers fast speeds because it uses Hydra, Hotspot Shield’s proprietary protocol. We cover more about the Hydra protocol in our Hotspot Shield review.

Hotspot Shield also licenses the use of the protocol to other VPN services. To find out more read our Kaspersky Secure Connection review and Bitdefender VPN review.

To test McAfee VPN’s speed, we connected to a nearby VPN server from our base in London.

Here are our full local speed test results:

As you can see, we saw just a 11% drop in download speed and an 8.73% drop in upload speed. This is impressive and matches the results from some top VPN services.

International speed test results

Speeds remained impressive on international connections. We saw a download speed drop of 37% when connected to an East Coast US server and just a 13% drop when connecting to the Netherlands.

Similarly to Private Tunnel, McAfee admits its poor streaming ability, stating “Netflix and Hulu […] might not work correctly over the secure VPN connection.”

More worryingly, however, McAfee’s customer service team were frequently surprised when we asked about Safe Connect’s streaming capabilities. They even asked why we thought using a VPN would unblock geo-restricted content.

As the company sees it, which has been reinforced in our testing, McAfee Safe Connect is simply not a VPN meant for streaming.

For improved streaming, see our lists of top-rated Netflix VPNs, BBC iPlayer VPNs, and general VPNs for streaming.

Without using a kill switch, you risk revealing your true IP address if your VPN connection drops for any reason. Alongside this, the sinister amount of information that McAfee Safe Connect logs could be effortlessly used to personally identify you.

This is a shame, as our tests showed torrenting to be allowed on all of Safe Connect’s servers and its fast upload speeds allowed for speedy P2P activity.

But torrenters should absolutely pick a no-logs VPN provider that also provides a kill switch instead.

To find out which VPN services we do recommend for P2P activity, check out our rundown of the best VPNs for torrenting.

These providers combine the most watertight privacy policies with blazing fast speeds and no torrenting restrictions.

McAfee Safe Connect runs on the somewhat secretive Catapult Hydra VPN protocol, making it a bit of a gamble when it comes to your online security.

The choice of Catapult Hydra concerns us for a few reasons. Firstly, McAfee does not state this is its chosen protocol anywhere. When we asked, multiple support agents stated this was simply “information that cannot be disclosed to customers.”

Virtually all other VPN providers definitively state their chosen VPN protocol, including those who also use Catapult Hydra, such as Hotspot Shield and Kaspersky Secure Connection.

As a result, McAfee’s secrecy makes us immediately suspicious, and for good reason.

In 2018, a major security flaw in Catapult Hydra was discovered by independent security researcher, Paulos Yibelo. This flaw meant that user data, such as a user’s country and the name of their WiFi network, could be accessed by a third party.

In conjunction with other publicly available data, this information could then be used to locate and personally identify a user.

A fix for the security flaw was quickly issued, but the fact this initially slipped through the net points to the larger problem of Catapult Hydra. It’s still not transparent enough.

By contrast, our preferred VPN protocol, OpenVPN, has been around since 2001 — having much longer to prove itself and to refine its methods through its open-source community.

Our biggest concern, however, is that McAfee Safe Connect lacks a kill switch on all platforms.

A kill switch is a feature that blocks your web traffic in the case of a dropped VPN connection. This means that your IP address could be exposed if this happens when running Safe Connect, jeopardizing your online privacy.

There are no advanced security features like split tunneling or manual port selection, either.

At least, McAfee Safe Connect utilizes the AES-256 cipher. Most major VPN services favor this method of encryption, which has yet to be broken.

Safe Connect also passed our IP and DNS leak tests. This is shown in the image below, where we are connecting to an East Coast US server from our base in London.

However, despite the use of AES-256 and IP and DNS leak protection being encouraging, this still falls far short of redeeming the shortcomings of Safe Connect’s encryption and security quality.

Simply, we cannot trust McAfee Safe Connect to keep your online activity anonymous and neither should you.

In order to bypass the so-called Great Firewall of China, VPNs need to employ clever obfuscation tools which mask VPN data and make it appear as regular HTTPS web traffic.

Only the very best VPN providers manage to consistently circumvent state-enforced restrictions, so it’s little surprise that McAfee Safe Connect falls short here.

McAfee Safe Connect lacks any of the required obfuscation tools and will therefore fail to bypass China’s, or any other regions’, censorship laws.

Even if that weren’t the case, Safe Connect’s overly intrusive logging policy means it would be a simply terrible VPN for use in highly-censored regions.

By logging your IP address, your device’s MAC address, your GPS location, and your biometric information, McAfee makes it as simple as possible for any government to identify you.

If you want to know what VPNs work in high-censorship countries, see our article on the best VPNs for bypassing censorship.

McAfee shares one knowledge base for its entire suite of products, but of 360 total articles, only eight of them mention Safe Connect.

Like with the rest of Safe Connect, it proves here again to be the neglected child of McAfee.

Safe Connect does have a phone number that you can contact, but we were told on two separate occasions that we would be called back and these calls never came.

Frustratingly, the live chat disconnects multiple times during a conversation. It will reconnect, most of the time, but we completely lost contact a few times.

McAfee Safe Connect shares a support infrastructure with the broader McAfee product line and it’s clear the agents have not been adequately trained to deal with the VPN product.

The support agents were unable to answer routine questions, like whether Safe Connect could be used to bypass geo-restricted content and how many total VPN servers there are.

On top of this, Safe Connect seems stifled by the legacy baggage of McAfee. For example, you are forced to provide your full name, email address, and phone number before initiating a live chat.

For a product that exists to protect your personal information, the requirement to provide information that can be used to personally identify you is self-defeating.

The Safe Connect support agents are also extremely heavy-handed in remotely taking control of your device. For example, we were asked to allow remote access after asking a simple question about access to US Netflix.

All of this is extremely off-putting and unnecessary. Especially for privacy-sensitive users, the thought of handing over your phone number and allowing remote access for basic issues might be a bit too much to swallow.