17 Jul 2019 | Rafael Cimatti

Anonymity on the internet

There's a lot of talk on the internet about anonymity these days. Some people want to become anonymous to prevent being monitored, while others want it to share sensitive information (such as activists and journalists) and of course some want it for illicit activities. In general, it is very difficult to guarantee anonymity online, due to:

What about Spod VPN?

If you read our first post or even just the last paragraph, you might be wondering how all of that works with Spod's VPN service. After all, the VPN and Web Filter features rely on routing all the traffic from iOS to Spod's servers. However, that doesn't mean you're leaving an identifiable trace with us.

How does it work?

We came up with a solution for anonymity in our service based on two principles:

  1. Payments through Apple: We don't process the subscriptions payments directly. Instead, we rely on AppStore for distribution and billing, making sure we never have our user's payment data (credit card, bank account, etc).
  2. No registration: That's when we really thought outside the box, what if we never required our users to register?

No registration

It's a simple idea, if we never ask for any PII (Personally Identifiable Information), it's impossible to identify our users and link them to their web traffic. And that was really important for us: We didn't want to ask our users to believe us with a no-log policy or something alike, we wanted to make it technically impossible to snoop on them (which is the main goal of a lot of VPN services). When the app is launched for the first time, a random username (which you can check in the 'More' tab inside the app) and a password are generated and stored. Afterwards, when Apple is done with the payment, a receipt is stored inside the app which means the user was successfully billed (without revealing any customer data). At that point we have enough information to control who's connected to the VPN and who paid for the service, even though we have zero personal information.

Result

The result is a truly anonymous service, where there are no links between your data and whatever servers and websites you visited on the internet while using the service.

Feel free to comment below with any question or suggestions! In the next post we will talk about privacy and web trackers. Follow us on social media to get updates from the blog.