Touch VPN Review

Touch VPN is owned by Aura, a company incorporated in the US. Aura has a general privacy policy and a VPN specific one, with both logging far too much of your data.

Aura assures readers:

“Aura does not record your VPN browsing activities in any way that can be associated back to you.”

The VPN privacy policy then goes on to immediately undermine this statement:

Touch VPN will collect your original IP address.

The fact Touch VPN needs to know your “approximate geographic location” based on your IP address goes to show how far it is from being a privacy-friendly VPN.

The service justifies the above by claiming that knowing your location helps “to provide you with [a] better service.” How this is supposed to work exactly, we’re not quite sure.

Even if Touch VPN didn’t log your IP address, your approximate location combined with your internet service provider would be enough to identify you.

Touch VPN talks about how it uses “tracking technologies,” such as cookies and page tags. It’s basically tracking all of your clicks and activities.

You even have to allow the app to track your phone in your device’s settings in order to use it.

The VPN service is also prepared to “allow [its] business partners to place certain tracking technologies in [its] services.” These “business partners” include 1Password and Identity Guard.

Overall, Touch VPN’s privacy policy is a mess.

US-based Ownership

Touch VPN is owned by digital security company Aura, based in the US. The company is also the developer behind Betternet.

Being American-owned is far from ideal, as the United States has extremely intrusive privacy laws and is a founding member of the Five-Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.

Since Touch VPN openly logs your web activity, being based in the United States is of great concern.

We couldn’t carry out our full, in-depth speed tests on Touch VPN due to its daily data cap of 500MB.

We were able to conduct speed tests connecting to the UK and US on the iOS app before exceeding our data limit.

Touch VPN will disconnect your VPN connection after you exceed 500MB of data.

On Android, we were able to test our connection to the UK and Germany before we were told to upgrade to a premium plan for a greater data allowance.

The results below use data taken from our Android tests:

For a free VPN, a 9% speed loss in download speed is excellent on a local connection. Frustratingly, you can’t take advantage of these fast speeds for anything other than browsing due to the 500MB data cap.

We couldn’t obtain a full set of results as Touch VPN’s Android app doesn’t offer US servers on its free version and our data limit ran out when testing our long-distance connection to an Australian VPN server.

However, we were able to test our medium range connection speeds to Europe.

These are very fast speeds, especially from a free service. Once again, the usefulness of these speeds is massively limited by the data cap.

We still don’t recommend purchasing the premium version for unlimited data due to Touch VPN’s intrusive logging policy and poor streaming performance.

Touch VPN performed much worse on desktop. The results below are taken from the Microsoft store app.

A 46% speed loss is really poor on a local connection. We exceeded our data limit before we could test our connection to longer distance servers but it’s likely our speeds would have dropped even further.

As with most free VPNs, Touch VPN is unable to access any streaming services.

Touch VPN can’t access a single Netflix library.

We found that Touch VPN consistently fails to unblock US Netflix and other streaming services on both its VPN apps and browser extensions.

You also wouldn’t be able to stream any content for long with Touch VPN’s restrictive 500MB data limit.

According to Netflix’s own guidelines on data usage, you would only be able to stream two hours of content on the lowest video quality setting with Touch VPN.

If you want to unblock international Netflix libraries on a budget then use one of these free VPNs to bypass geo-restrictions.

Touch VPN previously didn’t support P2P activity on any of its servers. We contacted Touch VPN’s support team for clarification and received this reply:

Touch VPN claims it supports torrenting and even recommends a client.

Despite what Touch VPN claims, torrenting still isn’t allowed. We ran several torrenting tests and our client paused every single time Touch VPN was active.

Even if Touch VPN did permit torrenting we still couldn’t recommend it as it logs far too much of your data and its jurisdiction is in the privacy-unfriendly US.

Moreover, your connection wouldn’t be secure enough to torrent with Touch VPN. A VPN kill switch is an absolute must for file sharing, but only the Android app comes equipped with one.

If you’re looking to protect your P2P activity, we recommend looking at our best VPNs for torrenting, instead.

Touch VPN is no good if you need to connect outside of China or any other highly-censored country.

There are no obfuscation tools to hide the fact that you’re using a VPN, so your government or ISP can detect and block your traffic with little effort if they wanted to.

Even if by chance you’re able to bypass China’s Great Firewall, or other blocks in censoring countries, Touch VPN doesn’t have the necessary security features to maintain your privacy.

Let’s not forget its ridiculously intrusive logging policy that means all of your online activity is monitored and stored, meaning it’s barely an improvement on not even using a VPN.

Touch VPN is not safe.

Its logging policy is incredibly invasive and includes the collection of personal data such as your IP address, location, browsing activity, and device type. This means your data is never secure when using Touch VPN, even if your traffic is encrypted.

We couldn’t find any information on Touch VPN’s website or applications about the encryption and VPN protocols in use. We asked the support team to clarify the encryption and protocols in use and were told:

“All device that is compatible with Touch VPN is using PPTP encryption and It is automatically set [sic].”

This is troubling. PPTP is an insecure and outdated protocol that should not be used under any circumstances. In fact, it’s been shown that a skilled attacker can hack into a PPTP-encrypted VPN connection in just a few minutes.

As none of the Touch VPN applications, aside from Android, provide any information on the protocol in use, we can assume that they all run on PPTP.

We struggled to test Touch VPN’s encryption on Windows as the VPN simply doesn’t work. The VPN connection would collapse almost immediately so we were unable to analyze the traffic.

Your personal data is at risk when using Touch VPN.

However, on the Microsoft store app, we found that our DNS requests were being leaked. This means your real IP address and browsing activity is visible to anyone monitoring your connection.

You won’t find a kill switch on any of the free Touch VPN apps, apart from Android. This means your personal data is exposed in the event of a sudden VPN disconnection.

We tested Touch VPN using our kill switch tool to see if the iOS app had a hidden kill switch enabled by default. As expected, Touch VPN leaked our real IP address every time, confirming the absence of a kill switch.

Touch VPN has developed an ad blocker called ‘Fireshield’ on iOS.

Surprisingly, Touch VPN has introduced a split tunneling feature on both of its mobile apps. The iOS app also comes with its own in-built ad blocker.

Touch VPN only scored 7% higher than Safari’s default ad block score.

The Fireshield ad blocker performed poorly in our testing. It managed to block a meager 22% of the most common advertisements and trackers.

When compared to conventional ad blockers, like uBlock Origin scoring 91%, this is an awful result.

Unlike the other platforms, Touch VPN’s Android app gives you a choice of VPN protocols. You can choose between Touch VPN’s proprietary HydraVPN protocol and the trusted OpenVPN UDP and TCP.

We asked the support team to clarify whether the Android app automatically uses PPTP or only the protocols listed above:

Touch VPN’s customer support provided inaccurate information.

Their response was confusing. The support agent described PPTP as an encryption cipher, like AES-256, when it’s actually a VPN protocol. Mixing up the two doesn’t bode well for Touch VPN’s security.

Overall, there’s no way we recommend Touch to anybody who takes their online privacy and security seriously. We would also like to see the split tunneling and ad blocker features become available across all platforms.

Touch VPN’s online resources are non-existent. There’s barely any information on its website and clicking on Contact Us immediately redirects you to the customer support email.

Touch VPN continues to paywall essential parts of its service.

You won’t be able to ask the support agents anything until you purchase Touch VPN’s premium package and provide proof of subscription. It’s almost unheard of for a VPN service to limit customer support to paid users.

The Touch VPN Windows Client has the best customer support options across all platforms.

The Windows client is your best bet for contacting a support agent. It features an in-app ticket system as well as some FAQs.

The macOS support section is almost identical to Windows except it paywalls the ticket system.

The iOS app has a Help tab in its settings which redirects you to the support email when tapped. Again, you need a premium account in order to access this service.

The Android app simply has a Send Feedback section. We tried asking a question through this feature but we never received a response.