You can switch from the regular status display to a real-time graph of internet traffic showing current upload and download speeds.

This doesn't necessarily matter - whatever region we chose, the sites all showed we'd been allocated an IP address from that country, and that's what's really important - but it was puzzling. We noticed that the IP address displayed in the app interface didn't correspond to the one we saw on third-party websites like. Select a server, the client connects quickly, then displays your new virtual location and IP address (there's no desktop notification of connects or disconnects, so you must watch the client interface to see what's going on).

This has no server load figures, no latencies, no Favorites system or anything else, and it's sorted by two letter country code rather than country name, which is initially confusing (Spain comes before France because the codes are ES and FR.) But one advantage of having so few locations is it only takes a moment to scroll through the list and find whatever you need. The client offers to install either a TAP or Wintun driver (the virtual network adapter used for VPN connections.) Most Windows VPN apps are TAP-only, but Wintun should offer better performance, so it's good to see users given a choice.Īfter logging in, the client presented us with its list of locations.

Setting up a Private Tunnel trial was easy, and within a minute or two we were downloading and installing the Windows client. This is the user interface of PrivateTunnel VPN's Windows app (Image credit: OpenVPN) Apps This wouldn't be easy, though, and the Privacy Policy also makes it clear that Private Tunnel won't comply with requests for information unless they're compelled to do so by a court. Private Tunnel isn't giving you complete anonymity, then, and if someone wants to trace you from an action you've taken online, there is a mechanism which might enable them to do that. This data is apparently kept to deal with 'with billing issues, troubleshooting, service offering evaluation, TOS issues, AUP issues, and for helping to prevent criminal activity performed over the service.' 'Each time a user connects to our Private Tunnel service, we retain the following data for 14-30 days: the user's source IP address, the Private Tunnel IP address used by the user, connection start and stop time and total number of bytes used.' Private Tunnel does have some session logging, as the company explains here. There's also no packet inspection of your traffic, and no throttling or rate limiting of speeds. As expected, the company says it doesn't 'log a user's traffic or the content of any communication.'

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