Both NordVPN and Surfshark passed our DNS leak test, meaning that they weren’t aware of our web activity or private IP addresses. Sure, we want our VPNs to hinder our browsing speeds as little as possible, but if they’re not really hiding our originating IP addresses, what good are they, anyway? DNS LeaksĭNS, which stands for domain name server, is the actual names of websites that stand for IP addresses we like to think of them as a house’s physical address versus saying something like “the red house on the corner”. All in all, both Surfshark and NordVPN are ideal for (private) home entertainment.Īnother essential feature of our VPN tests regards security. Still, torrenting should be fine on either VPN, although with NordVPN, we had to use uTorrent specifically. That being said, Netflix may not always work on all servers, as the streaming giant works pretty hard to block VPN servers’ IP addresses. When we wanted to hide our torrenting and Netflix activity by connecting to a VPN, Surfshark and NordVPN pulled through. Score one more point for Surfshark! Torrenting and Netflixĭid you know that the average American spends nearly three hours a day watching television? 2 We’ll be honest: that number sounded kind of low to us, especially with all of the streaming and torrenting options available. NordVPN, on the other hand, took an all-or-nothing approach, routing all of our traffic through their encrypted tunnel. This lowered our bandwidth so our speeds weren’t as affected. With Surfshark, we got to decide which traffic we wanted to connect to their VPN and which traffic we wanted to leave connected directly to the public Wi-Fi network. Split TunnelingĪnother area where Surfshark surpasses NordVPN is with split tunneling. We like to think of kill switches as safety nets that hide our web traffic from our Internet Service Provider (ISP) even if the VPN fails. Surfshark Kill switch Kill Switchīoth VPNs had kill switches, meaning when they inevitably got disconnected, our web browsers quit automatically. This wasn’t an option with Surfshark, however, free or paid, so Nord takes the cake when it comes to their shared IP addresses. Now, with NordVPN, this address was shared with other NordVPN users, making us more difficult to trace they also offered dedicated IP addresses for websites like Gmail, PayPal and eBay, sold for the price of $70 per year, as detailed on our NordVPN pricing page. On the other hand, every time we connected to either VPN, we’d get the same IP address to replacing our originating IP addresses every time. This is really above and beyond when it comes to encryption, making NordVPN and Surfshark two of our safest options for the privacy-concerned. On top of that, both services encrypted our web traffic multiple times through different servers, a process called multi-hop. Encryption Methodsīoth VPNs used AES-256, the industry standard for encryption. While our Surfshark review and our NordVPN review go into more detail, here’s a general overview. Now it’s time to see how Surfshark and NordVPN compare in terms of what we got with their VPN service. Surfshark logged the bare minimum, so in terms of privacy, it actually beats NordVPN. While neither VPN kept track of the websites we visited while connected, nor our devices’ private IP addresses, NordVPN kept some information about when we connected to their app as well as some device information that wasn’t completely necessary. What neither logs: Web activity, IP address when connected to VPNĪs you can see just by skimming, NordVPN collects a pretty significant amount of user information compared to Surfshark.What Surfshark logs that NordVPN doesn’t: Encrypted password.What NordVPN logs that Surfshark doesn’t: IP address of the device used for payment, server load information, username, timestamp of last session status, whether or not the user has connected in the past 30 days, information about in-app events, device model, operating system version, device identifiers.What NordVPN and SurfShark both log: Email address, payment data, application diagnostics such as crash error reports.We also read each VPN’s privacy policy to see what information of ours the VPN kept. That means that the companies will never be legally obligated to give the government user data, which is ideal for a service that exists to give users privacy. How do Surfshark and NordVPN stack up in terms of privacy? Privacy Jurisdictionīoth Surfshark and NordVPN are based in countries that aren’t members of the international surveillance alliances Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes (the British Virgin Islands and Panama, to be specific). 1 If data collection is a bug, then VPNs are the bug spray meant to eradicate online tracking, allowing users to stay private online. Given the ubiquity of security breaches and hackings, it’s no surprise that nearly 80 percent of Americans say they are concerned about how much personal data companies collect from them.
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