What WrapVPN isn't: an anonymity service

Let's follow one evening. You're in a café, on its Wi-Fi, reading a news article about a health worry you'd rather keep to yourself. Three parties sit between you and that article: the café's network, the internet provider the café pays for, and the news site itself.

Without a VPN, the article itself is already protected. The site uses HTTPS, so nobody on the café's network can read the page. What they can see is the name of the site and when you visited it, and the news site sees the café's internet address.

Now connect WrapVPN first. The café's network and its provider see one encrypted stream to one of our servers, and nothing about where it leads. The news site sees the address of our exit server, which everyone connected to that server shares, rather than the café's.

At home, swap the café for your own internet provider and the story is the same. That's privacy as we mean it: the people running the networks you pass through can't tell where you're going, and websites can't tie your visit to your address.

Here's the same evening from our side. To give you a connection, our server needs to know who's asking. You signed in with Apple or Google, so we hold your account and the email address they gave us, or a private relay address if you chose Apple's Hide My Email. Each sign-in is recorded with the internet address it came from, and so are the app's requests to our servers.

When you connected, we kept a connection record: your account, the time, the server you picked and how long the session lasted. Each hour, the exit server also sends us a usage summary with the amount of data your connection used and the addresses and domain names it reached, and that summary can be linked to your account. In this example, the news site's name would very likely be in it.

What we can't see is the article. HTTPS protects it from us exactly as it protects it from the café. Anything a site sends without encryption is different, because it can be read on the exit server, though very little of the web works that way now.

A post office box is a fair comparison. The people who write to you see the box's address, and the postman on your street no longer learns who your letters are from. The post office, though, knows whose box it is.

None of this is accidental. A subscription service has to know who has subscribed, and the free plan's three one-hour sessions a week only work if we can count them for each account. Running servers well means knowing how busy each one is and noticing when one is struggling.

We use these records to run the service, apply your plan, and find and fix problems. We don't sell personal information. If a public authority sends us a valid legal request, what we hold is what we could be required to disclose, and nothing beyond it.

We'd rather say all of that plainly than hide it behind a slogan. Our privacy policy lists each record, why we keep it and how long it stays, and it's worth reading before you choose any VPN, ours included.

Changing your address is one part of privacy, and often not the biggest. If you're signed in to a site, it knows it's you, whichever server you came through. Cookies from an earlier visit identify your browser just as well, and a site can recognise a device from a mix of its screen size, language, time zone and other small details.

Clean Web, our ad and tracker blocker, helps at the edges. It stops your device looking up known advertising and tracking domains, so those connections never start. It blocks by name, though, so a tracker served from the site's own domain still loads.

This isn't special to WrapVPN. It's where any network tool's reach ends, and it's one more reason we don't describe ourselves as anonymous.

Anonymity tools are built differently from the ground up. The good ones need no account and no payment that leads back to you, and they pass your traffic through several independent relays, so no single operator ever sees both who you are and where you're going.

That design has a cost. Pages load more slowly, and some sites treat that traffic with suspicion. It's a price worth paying when the stakes are high, and an odd one to pay for checking the football scores on hotel Wi-Fi.

If you're a journalist protecting a source, an activist, or anyone who could come to harm if what you read or write were linked to your name, use a dedicated anonymity tool and learn to use it well. The worst outcome we can imagine is someone relying on WrapVPN for a kind of protection it was never designed to give.

WrapVPN gives you a fast, encrypted connection that hides where you're going from the networks you pass through and hides your own address from the sites you visit, in exchange for us knowing who you are and keeping the records described above. For everyday privacy on café, hotel and home networks, we think that's a fair deal, and we'd rather you chose it knowing exactly what it is. If it suits you, install WrapVPN and try it on the free plan's three one-hour sessions a week.