![]() We’ll explain why this is troubling in the next section. Alarmingly, the VPN also shares your information with the Avast Group. The most concerning part of HMA’s privacy policy is its willingness to share your information with third parties, including partner service providers and state authorities. True, the VPN collects information like the day of connection and the amount of data transmitted, but that’s standard fare for running a VPN service, as you can read in our CyberGhost review. It doesn’t log your originating IP, DNS queries or browsing history. When it comes to the VPN service, HMA does much better. This is concerning since it can be traced to you and the VPN keeps the data for 30 days. First, the VPN makes it clear that it collects the originating IP and domain of people who use the HideMyAss proxy. We dug through its privacy policy to verify the claim and we found some interesting results. HMA claims on its website to have a no-logs policy. Read our Mullvad review to learn about a VPN that offers it. Unfortunately, there’s no WireGuard protocol, which is a modern, lightweight and fast VPN protocol. We don’t recommend using it since it’s dated and susceptible to brute-force attacks, as you can see in our article on VPN protocols. There’s also the Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP). IKEv2/IPSec is better for mobile devices because it’s quick to reconnect. If you want to use the VPN on iOS and macOS, you’ll have to use the IKEv2/IPSec protocol. However, OpenVPN is reserved for Windows and Android devices. The default on HMA is the OpenVPN protocol (TCP and UDP), and rightly so because it’s the security standard among VPN protocols. HMA VPN offers a variety of protocol options, which you can use depending on your needs. HMA VPN Protocols ExplainedĪ VPN protocol governs how your VPN connects to the internet, and it’s the second piece in a VPN’s security puzzle, alongside encryption. Read our ExpressVPN review for an example of a VPN that comes with PFS. This feature regularly changes your encryption keys, so cybercriminals can’t decrypt all your data, even with access to the VPN’s servers. Unfortunately, HMA doesn’t have the increasingly popular perfect forward secrecy (PFS). Learn more about this encryption protocol in our piece on AES encryption. HMA comes with AES-256 encryption, which is the gold standard for VPNs and is virtually unbreakable. Securityįor the best security, you need a VPN with robust encryption. Overall, HMA is not the fastest VPN we’ve tested, but it posted good enough speeds for us to classify it as “usable.” The good thing is you can always test your VPN server speeds using the built-in speed test function. For now, all you need to know is that emulating such a widespread network on a relatively small server count might also account for the lackluster speeds.Īs expected, the speeds in Australia and Singapore took quite a hit, because they were far from our testing location. We’ll talk more about those in the “server locations” section. Of course, we could also chalk this up to HMA’s use of virtual servers. Cheaping out on server hardware might be what allows HMA to cover so many countries. and U.K., are kitted with better hardware. This likely means more popular locations, like the U.S. servers gave us our best results, even though they’re farther away from our testing location than the servers in Gambia. took quite a hit, although the upload speeds were much better. Read on to discover if anything has changed and whether this middling VPN now comes anywhere close to the best VPNs on the market. In our last HMA review, we were concerned about the VPN’s inconsistent speeds and affiliation with Avast, a company that has a dodgy privacy history.
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