There is no ability for anonymous or semi-anonymous payment forms like Bitcoin or cash.Įven if you could pay anonymously with HotSpot Shield you probably wouldn’t want to once you looked at the service’s privacy policy-there’s a lot in there not to like if you’re privacy conscious. For payments, it only takes standard options of credit cards and PayPal. When you first sign up for the service, it asks for an email address and a password, which is pretty standard for mainstream VPN services. Its CEO is David Gorodyanksy and the CTO is Eugene Malobrodsky-they are also the company’s co-founders. headquarters are located at 1800 Seaport Blvd., Redwood City, CA 94063. Privacy, anonymity, and trust AnchorFreeĪnchorFree’s U.S.

I asked AnchorFree about this and the company said it does use virtual server locations, where the physical machine may be in one location but looks like it’s in another.Īs always, take these speed tests with a grain of salt-as you should with any VPN speed test-because your experience may vary. The elapsed time was 13.612 milliseconds, which is impossible and strongly suggests that the server I was using was serving an American IP from central Europe. The day Netflix thought I was in Germany, I did manage to get one successful traceroute from a supposed connection in California to Vienna, Austria. Given this odd combination I tried running some ping and traceroute tests, but most of them timed out. HotSpot Shield did give me a few DNS servers in Germany that day, which likely contributed to Netflix’s confusion. servers, for example, I got an American IP but Google thought I was in the UK-thus it redirected my browser to .uk-and Netflix thought I was in Germany. The first time I connected to HotSpot Shield’s U.S.

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