
Hotspot Shield does release transparency reports ( the most recent in 2018), however, we'd prefer third-party assessments.Īs a silver lining of sorts, the provider did pass our VPN leak tests for IPv6, DNS, and WebRTC without issue. The provider could quiet most of our concerns relatively easily by submitting to an independent security audit, as some of its competitors ( NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and TunnelBear) have done. Further dampening the mood is that the service uses some trackers for analytical purposes. All the same, they're more invasive than necessary, or as is the case with other VPN services. Hotspot Shield notes that none of these logs contain information about you, your account, or your surfing activity. More red flags: According to Aura's privacy policy, all of its affiliates (including Pango, and by extension, Hotspot Shield) collect information, despite the latter's "No-Logs" promise. However, since this protocol isn't open-source, more questions are raised about its exact functionality and mode of encryption, than is the case with OpenVPN or WireGuard. On paper, encryption seems to be airtight, with Catapult Hydra used by other VPNs as well (such as Bitdefender, which won best antivirus software in our ranking).
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" Our steadfast security, inspired by the software defined perimeter (SDP) model pioneered by the US Department of Defense, supports both 128-bit AES and 256-bit AES encryption, and we use 128-bit AES encryption as a standard." Windows Mac Android iPhone iPad Linux Chrome Huawei Also Compatible With PPTP Manual Setup Other VPN Protocols PureVPN offers support for all major VPN.In its support area, Hotspot Shield recently remarked (May 2021) upon its approach to encryption: Still, so far as data privacy is concerned, you'd have to be born yesterday to blindly trust a Silicon Valley-based tech company. Since our last assessment, support for IKEv2 has been integrated, somewhat rectifying this. Because Hotspot Shield primarily relies upon a proprietary protocol (Catapult Hydra), users are even more dependent upon its security and privacy guarantees than usual.
