OCTOBER 2019 MACWORLD 105ECP521 for the handshake.
Hide.me says it does not track your
browsing and has a strict no-logs policy,
which it says was verified by security and
penetration testing firm, Defensecode. It
does, however, monitor bandwidth usage,
and it maintains a troubleshooting log on
its servers containing a randomly assigned
username and internal IP address. That
data is erased every few hours. The
company is officially based in Malaysia.
When you first activate Hide.me you
get a very simple application. In the center
of the window there’s an Enable VPN
button, and above that your disconnected/
connected status. Towards the bottom-left
you have your current IP address, and the
bottom-right is where you can change your
country location.
In the settings area (click the cog in the
upper-right corner of the main window),
Hide.me activates an internet kill switch by
default. If your VPN connection drops, the
application will automatically stop all
applications from accessing the internet to
avoid exposing your activities to third
parties. There’s also an option, again
activated by default, that automatically
reconnects to the VPN when the internet
connection drops.
Those are understandable default
options, and Hide.me also offers an
option to start the application minimized.
Neither are turned on by default.
Hide.me offers VPN servers in 34
countries with more than 160 total servers
behind the scenes. Many of the smaller
countries offer just one option, but when
there are multiple options for a particular
country you’ll see a drop-down arrow.
Click that, and you can see all the
location options for that country. The
United States, for example, has 11
different regional options.
Hide.me allows P2P on many of its
servers. If it’s not allowed you’ll see a red
label to the right that reads “No P2P.”
In our tests, Hide.me performed fairly
well, but not amazingly. The result was
actually surprising because Hide.me was
quite zippy on the Windows side when we
reviewed the service in August 2018. At
the time, Hide.me maintained nearly 49
percent of the base speed in our testingHide.me’s server selection screen.