Perfect Privacy Review

Perfect Privacy was founded in 2008, at a time when commercial VPN services for individual use were just starting to take off.

But there’s not much information available about who founded the company.

All its website says is that Perfect Privacy is the “initiative of private and independent individuals from different parts of the globe, dedicated to protect your privacy and anonymity online.”

Perfect Privacy does name Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company as the party responsible for processing data on its website and Steffen Wernéry, who is a member of the German Association for Data Protection and Data Security, as the data protection officer.

Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company is Swiss and Wernéry is German.

The website and app are both available in German. A bonus for German speaking users and a clue to it’s operation (if not legal jurisdiction).

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 (as well as Switzerland) is considered a privacy haven, removed from international data-sharing nations like the Five-Eyes and the EU.

Perfect Privacy’s logging policy also complements its name well: it doesn’t log any user information.

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

It really is very private.

In order to maintain the service Perfect Privacy does record the total load of each individual server, which you can see on the website’s status page.

That’s nothing to worry about, though, as this information can’t be linked back to individual users.

Perfect Privacy goes a step further to show users how safe it is by publishing a regular warrant canary. Here’s a recent statement:

“As of Jan 20, 2020, we have received

• NO National Security Letters
• NO warrants in regards to the Perfect Privacy VPN service
• NO domestic or foreign court orders
• NO requests to backdoor our service or compromise our customer’s privacy in any way
• NO gag orders which would prevent us from stating that we have received legal process seeking our users’ information”

Perfect Privacy really is private but, unfortunately, it’s not very fast.

Even when we connected to servers near our physical location (London, UK), we still experienced around a 30% drop in our internet speeds. We actually found the fastest speeds when connecting to the France server.

While this won’t be noticeable for most users, those with more performance-heavy needs – like torrenters or gamers – will probably need better speeds.

If that’s you, check out our list of the fastest VPNs on the market.

Download speed without Perfect Privacy: 93.26Mbps

Download speed with Perfect Privacy: 65.49Mbps

Our download speed loss when Perfect Privacy is running: 30%

Unless you just plan on browsing, we don’t recommend connecting to Perfect Privacy servers that are far away from your physical location – it’ll really slow down your internet speeds.

From London to the US East Coast we experienced a speed drop of over 80%. Not good at all.

Perfect Privacy’s poor speeds might be down to its small server network.

There are only 57 individual servers in 26 countries, which means they’re likely to get quite congested at peak times.

All of these servers are real, physical objects, though, as Perfect Privacy “renounces” the use of virtual servers.

The few servers available are spread fairly evenly around Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America.

However, Egypt is the only server in Africa, and there are none in South America.

Surprisingly, Perfect Privacy allows users to drill down to city level in a handful of countries, which provides users with access to even more specific content and – hopefully – better speeds.

• France (3)
• Germany (5)
• Netherlands (2)
• Sweden (2)
• Switzerland (2)
• UK (2)
• US (5)

Perfect Privacy isn’t designed to unblock streaming sites like Netflix and BBC iPlayer, and our tests confirmed it.

We found Netflix to be blocked on all the US servers, and BBC iPlayer on the UK servers.

If you need a VPN for streaming, follow this link to find out the best ones for the job.

Perfect Privacy redeems itself a little when it comes to torrenting.

P2P traffic is permitted on all of Perfect Privacy’s servers, except for the US and France ones.

With high levels of privacy and security, it will certainly keep you safe while you torrent.

However, Perfect Privacy’s subpar speeds might be a hindrance for some. If you only want to use file-sharing programs occasionally it’s a great choice, but heavy torrenters should take a look at these top VPNs instead.

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.

But there are still some VPN services that work (fairly) reliably – follow this link to see the best VPNs for China.

While Perfect Privacy is secure enough for other high censorship countries, its speeds aren’t ideal. Here are some guides we’ve published for those countries:

• Russia
• Turkey
• UAE

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 adobt 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.

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:

Now for the more advanced stuff.

Perfect Privacy allows for port forwarding, which is useful for gaming and torrenting.

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.

There’s also quite a few other tools and settings to adjust for a really tailored VPN service.

The Android app doesn’t include any of these advanced features, though, and you will manually have to enable the VPN kill switch.

As we mentioned above, Perfect Privacy’s desktop apps come with loads of configurable options. While that makes it an attractive choice for more experienced users, it can look intimidating to beginners.

It doesn’t help that Perfect Privacy’s apps look very outdated.

Once you cut through all the noise, they’re fairly easy to use.

Rather than having a big central connect button like most VPN apps do, Perfect Privacy has individual connect buttons for each server, and you have to disconnect manually from one in order to connect to another. It feels pretty clunky.

Perhaps the biggest issue is the lack of custom app for iOS devices. If you’re a beginner and an iPhone user, it’s best to stick to one of these VPNs instead.

Perfect Privacy isn’t as polished as the top VPNs we’ve tested, and that shows the most in its customer support.

For a start, 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 – but the replies can be fairly slow. We had to wait half a day for the first reply, and the response wasn’t very clear.

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

Perfect Privacy accepts loads of payment methods, including:

• Debit and credit card
• PayPal
• Bitcoin & Bitcoin Cash
• Alipay
• UnionPay
• A variety of other international methods via Paymentwall

There’s also a seven-day money-back guarantee “if you are not 100% satisfied” with the service.

The Terms of Service does encourage users experiencing technical difficulties to get in touch with customer support in order to troubleshoot the issue before requesting a refund.

It depends. If you’re an experienced techie who’s looking for top-notch privacy and security Perfect Privacy is a great choice.

But if you’re a beginner or looking to access popular streaming services like Netflix, Perfect Privacy isn’t for you. There are far cheaper and more reliable options for that purpose.

Additional research by Liam Mullally