VPNs for Security and Privacy: 2019 Edition

Mullvad is in my opinion currently the most secure VPN service. It's the VPN recommended by Privacy Tools and it has undergone a security audit. It also does really well in That One Privacy Site's VPN comparison chart. Mullvad is run by Internet activists and is based in Sweden, which has good privacy laws, they keep no logs, support OpenVPN, and their VPN client is open source and written in Rust, which is known as the most secure programming language. Mullvad allows customers to pay anonymously via Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash or even by mailing them cash, for those who do not want a digital trail left behind after their VPN purchase. They are also selling anonymous activation codes for Mullvad in stores in the Nordic countries. Mullvad requires no personal information to start an account, not even an email address, making it the most anonymous VPN service on this list. Just fill in the captcha, generate an account number and pay to activate the account.

AirVPN is a secure VPN for Windows. It was one of only six VPNs (of 29 tested) that passed VPNTesting.info's extensive leak test on Windows. AirVPN did however not pass the Mac leak test. It also does really well in That One Privacy Site's VPN comparison chart. AirVPN is based in Italy, keeps no logs, allows customers to pay anonymously via cryptocurrencies like Monero and Bitcoin, supports OpenVPN, and their VPN client is open source. AirVPN's staff includes activists, hacktivists and members or the Swedish and Italian Pirate Parties.

ProtonVPN is a new VPN service by the former CERN and MIT researchers behind the well-known encrypted ProtonMail email service. The ProtonVPN client has a feature called Secure Core which - much like Tor - routes traffic via two intermediary VPN servers before reaching the final VPN server in order to make surveillance harder for adversaries to perform. VPN servers in countries that are well-known for having some of the strongest privacy laws in the world - Iceland and Sweden - are used as intermediary destinations for the Secure Core feature. ProtonVPN is based in Switzerland, which has good privacy laws. ProtonVPN only keeps connection logs (when you connect and disconnect from the VPN) in order to prevent intrusion attempts into their service, it supports OpenVPN and accepts Bitcoin. ProtonVPN offer quite a generous free plan, which is ment to convince potential customers to pay for one of their premium plans for more features and higher speeds (the speed on the free servers is still very good though). The free servers do not support BitTorrent, which is understandable since the server load and hosting costs that would result of offering a free torrenting VPN to the world is not sustainable. ProtonVPN has not been thoroughly leak tested by vpntesting.info or anyone else yet, so please keep that in mind and leak test the VPN before using it for anything mission critical.

OVPN.com was one of only four VPNs (of 29 tested) that passed VPNTesting.info's extensive leak test on Mac. OVPN.com did however not pass the Windows leak test. It also does really well in That One Privacy Site's VPN comparison chart. OVPN.com is based in Sweden, which has good privacy laws, they keep no logs, support OpenVPN, and they allow customers to pay anonymously via Bitcoin or even by mailing them cash, for those who do not want a digital trail left behind after their VPN purchase. OVPN.com has gone to great lengths to ensure physical security by removing any kind of storage media, so their servers have no hard drives, USBs, or CD in them and thus it is impossible for those servers to store any user data. OVPN.com has taken out an insureance for trial costs that covers up to 2.5 million SEK (about $280 000 / 260 000€).