30 MACWORLD SEPTEMBER 2020
MACUSER REVIEW: WINDSCRIBE FOR MACSECURITY, SOFTWARE, AND
SERVERS
Windscribe is based in Richmond Hill,
Ontario and was founded by Yegor Sak
and Alex Paguis. The service offers 59
different country connections (plus a
“Fake Antartica” connection) with more
than 600 servers. By default, Windscribe
uses the IKEv2 protocol, with OpenVPN
options as fallback. Data encryption is
AES-256 with SHA-512 for data
authentication, and the handshake is
handled by a 4096-bit RSA key.
The company’s privacy policy is fairly
straightforward. Windscribe stores the total
amount of data transferred through a VPN
account every 30 days—each account has
a “bandwidth reset” date in the My
Account section. Windscribe also retains
the timestamp of an account’s last activity
on the VPN network, and it tracks the
number of connections that a single
account is using at the same time.
The company says it does not retain
your IP address, the sites you visit, or a
record of all your VPN sessions. When a
connection is active the Windscribe server
keeps a few items in memory including
your username, time of connection, and
the amount of data transferred.
Sign-ups for Windscribe require a
username and password. The company
doesn’t require an email address, but
adding one helps in the case of password
recovery—using a good password
manager is one way around that.
Windscribe’s privacy policy is not quite as
good as Mullvad’s (go.macworld.com/
muvd), which supplies a random code for
logging in (and that’s it). Still, Windscribe is
a good choice for privacy based on what
we know.
Windscribe is a little box displaying a
large power button, the current IP address,WIndscribe
for Mac.
Windscribe for Mac with a live connection.