About
Independent, and specific about what that means
VPN and Privacy is a VPN and online-privacy site with one owner, no VPN-company investors, and a public formula for everything it ranks.
Why this site exists
Most of the VPN rankings you will find are published by companies that also own VPNs. Kape Technologies owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and Private Internet Access — and vpnMentor, WizCase and SafetyDetectives. Ziff Davis owns IPVanish — and PCMag and Mashable. The rankings on those sites are not necessarily wrong, but a reader cannot tell, because the relationship is not stated where it would be seen.
This site was built to be the alternative: every ranking opens with who owns the VPN, every number we quote is either public and sourced or measured by us on a paid subscription, and everything we earn from a provider is listed on the disclosure page, per provider, next to how we ranked them.
Who writes it
Pages are published under the site's name rather than an individual byline. That is a deliberate choice, and it puts more weight on the things a reader can actually check: the scoring formula is published in full and enforced in the build, every provider record lists its sources and the date each fact was last checked, every measurement we have not made is labelled pending rather than filled in, and the commission we earn from each provider is printed next to where that provider ranked.
If you need to reach a person, the contact page goes to one.
How it is paid for
Affiliate commission on some links and, once traffic justifies it, display advertising. We are not yet enrolled in most affiliate programmes; the disclosure page says which. Commission is never an input to the score — the build fails if the scoring code so much as mentions the word.
What we track
23 VPN providers and 50 parent companies, with one JSON record per provider that every page on the site reads from. Provider facts are re-checked monthly; App Store review analysis refreshes automatically on the first of the month. Our own speed and leak tests are being run one provider at a time on paid subscriptions and are marked "pending" until they land.
What we will not do
- Publish a speed or leak number we did not measure ourselves.
- Accept a free press account, or let a provider see a review before publication.
- Remove a provider from the not recommended list for money.
- Load a third-party script, tracker or web font on any page.
Contact
Corrections, tips and ownership changes: contact page. If a fact on this site is wrong, we would rather know today.