At Windscribe, “transparency” is not just a word we throw around. It’s hard-coded into our daily actions and guides our overarching ethics and philosophy as a VPN provider. From customer data to law enforcement requests to open-sourcing our app codebase, here are some of the ways transparency is embodied at Windscribe:
The Less We Know, The Better: No Identifying Logs
Not just a banger Tame Impala tune, but words to live by. As a privacy company, we feel it would be both hypocritical and morally irresponsible to maintain any identifying logs. So we don’t. Your data is as important to us as it is to you and we believe you deserve to be able to make informed decisions about it. We’ve laid out our entire privacy policy here without any of that fancy lawyer speak. We also wrote this masterpiece of literature which explains our logging policies in great technical detail. If it’s unclear to you, we’re always reachable to clarify any questions you may have.
At Windscribe, we do not maintain any records of your connections, IP timestamps, or session logs, and we do not monitor your online activities. We do keep track of the last time you used our service and the amount of bandwidth you consumed in a 30-day cycle. This information is used to enforce the limitations of our free tier and prevent any potential misuse. It is important to note that this data is not kept historically and only represents a rolling counter.
- This also means that we have nothing to give law enforcement should they request data from us. You can find more information in our live Transparency Report.
We Are An Open Book (Of Code)
That’s right, we provide open-source code for our Desktop apps (Mac, Windows, and Linux), Android app, and our Browser extension. Do you want to see how the sausage is made? Do you want to tweak/customize/break? We’re providing our app code right here - knock yourself out! You also check out our Desktop App Audit and the Mobile App Audit.
Stay in the Know with Our Live Server Status Page
Our live server status page is permanently publicly available, so you can make the most informed decisions in terms of where to connect. Not sure which servers are up or down? Curious about the server usage percentage at this exact moment? We got you.
For example, here is a quick look at our UK server locations - at the time of the screenshot, London Custard had only 4% usage, with the highest usage on London Crumpets at 29%. At Windscribe, we work to ensure server locations are never overloaded and aim to keep our % usage numbers on the lower side of things.
You can also use this page to take a quick look at which locations do not allow peer-to-peer traffic - keep an eye out for the crossed-out P2P icon and do not connect to these locations if you are, um, you know, downloading stuff.
It’s worth noting that you can also check these metrics directly in the Windscribe app, provided you have the “Show Location Load” toggle activated in General Preferences.
We Pull Our Own Strings: No Outside Funding
Did you know? Windscribe has zero venture capitalist involvement or outside funding. This means all the decisions we make are based on principle, not based on what investors want.
Us? Track You? Never.
Windscribe has absolutely zero 3rd party trackers on our website. As a VPN provider with tracker-blocking capabilities, it would be absolutely absurd of us to use tracking on our own website. So we don’t. But you can’t say that for other VPNs - take a look:
Using Chrome DevTools and the Sources Tab, we can check the number of unique domains that are requested when you load any website. See those Google, Facebook, and Cookiebot domains for Nord and Surfshark? Those are 3rd party trackers - every time you visit those sites, data about you is being collected without you even knowing it. You don’t see any of those on the Windscribe site. We wrote an article a while back about this and a lot of this information is still relevant 4 years later. In fact, the tracking tech has only gotten better since then.
In fact, you may find it surprising to learn that most of these VPN companies are really just marketing companies in everything but name. We feel very strongly that this is a serious issue within the VPN industry, so much so that we created this VPN map to illustrate the shady nature under which many companies operate.
Let Us Give It to You Straight
If you’re keen to learn more specific details about what differentiates Windscribe from other companies, we’ve summarized it all for you right here in our Ethics and Philosophy statement.
And in case you’re not that much of a reader, here’s a snapshot of what you can expect from us:
Things we DON’T do:
- Analytics/tracking on Windscribe.com
- Paid ads
- Paid VPN reviews
- Paid sponsorships
- Social Shilling (that means no paid influencers)
- Logging personal data
Things we do:
- Offer a free service; sometimes people can’t pay for privacy but that shouldn’t stop them from having a right to it
- Listen to our users; there are several ways to get in touch with us for feature requests or support - so don’t hesitate to reach out!
Here are all the ways you can get in touch:
