The ExpressVPN development team has always been focused on user privacy. Now they are taking things a step further with a new initiative to help users test the privacy of any VPN service. The ExpressVPN Privacy Research Lab has developed a series of privacy testing tools that you can use. Best of all they have decided to open source under the MIT license so others can review the code. Paul Bischoff conducted a series of initial testing for Comparitech. His insightful article includes the testing results for a number of leading VPNs.
We have not had a chance to use the new privacy testing tools from ExpressVPN yet. Before jumping in we wanted to share the news so you can try out the privacy tools as well. From what we read on the ExpressVPN website and the initial results from Comparitech, we look forward to incorporating the new privacy tools into our testing. Speed and reliability are important but strong privacy is the end goal of using a VPN for most users.
Here’s a quick list of leaks that the ExpressVPN privacy tools will help you test:
- IP address leaks
- IP traffic leaks
- DNS leaks
- WebRTC leaks
- Bittorrent leaks
- Leaks resulting from unstable network connections
- Leaks resulting from VPN servers being unreachable
The new privacy testing tools were developed in Python so you’ll find that they support a wide range of devices. You can download the new tools from Github to test your current VPN service. Please share any feedback with ExpressVPN so that they can continue to develop the testing tools. Share your impressions with us @VPNSP.