Perfect Privacy Review

Perfect Privacy was created in 2008.

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

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 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 put to the test in 2016 when Dutch authorities seized two of Perfect Privacy’s Rotterdam servers, however, it was confirmed that “no customer information was compromised due to the seizure.”

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 Aug 25, 2021, 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”

When connected to servers near our physical location (London, UK), we experienced some impressive speeds, with only a 13% drop in download speed. Strangely, we found the fastest speeds when connecting to the France server with a 12% drop.

Further afield we saw an average decrease of 40% in Germany, which isn’t noticeable for most users, but if you have more performance-heavy needs, like for torrenting or gaming, you need better speeds.

Long-Distance Speed Tests

We also tested Perfect Privacy’s international speeds by connecting to servers in the US, Singapore, and Australia. There results were really poor.

Our connection from London to the US East Coast saw a speed loss of over 80%, this is unacceptable.

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.

We also recorded a ping of 195ms in New York and 571ms in Australia which means any users attempting to game online will experience unplayable amounts of lag.

If you can connect to a nearby server then Perfect privacy can provide some first class speeds. But, if you’re located outside the server network we recommend an alternative VPN.

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.

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.

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.

Perfect Privacy’s torrenting speeds are excellent with an average of 9.0 MiB/s. This is a small drop from our no-VPN speed of 10.9 Mib/s.

With a strict no-logs policy and a kill switch, Perfect Privacy will keep you safe while torrenting.

Port Forwarding Tool

Perfect Privacy comes with a port forwarding feature which lets you interact with a greater number of peers in a torrent swarm.

This can significantly increase your P2P speeds.

However, this feature is only available on the Windows app.

There is an option for “general port forwarding” on Mac but it requires a manual installation.

Effective Kill Switch

Perfect Privacy’s Windows app comes with a customisable kill switch which will automatically disconnect your device from the internet should your VPN connection fail.

This is essential for torrenters. Your real IP address would be visible to everyone in the torrent swarm if you disconnected from a VPN service that doesn’t use a kill switch.

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.

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.