How We Test Privacy Tools
Why this matters
The VPN industry runs almost entirely on affiliate commissions. Review sites earn more when you click and buy, which creates an obvious incentive to rank products by revenue rather than quality. We do the opposite: every ranking on this site is driven by verifiable, reproducible test results. If a VPN fails our leak tests, we say so — regardless of whether they have an affiliate program.
The testing rig
- 500 Mbps fiber Ethernet connection (no Wi-Fi — eliminates interference variables)
- Windows 11 and macOS Sonoma (both tested for every major product)
- Chrome, Firefox, and Safari at their latest stable releases
- 5 test endpoints: US East, US West, UK, Germany, and Australia
- Bare metal hardware — no VMs, no shared infrastructure
Leak protection tests
- WebRTC leak test — browsers can expose your real IP via WebRTC even when a VPN is active. We run our WebRTC leak test before and during VPN connection to verify real-IP exposure.
- DNS leak test — if your DNS queries leave the VPN tunnel, your ISP can see your browsing. We verify resolver behavior using our DNS lookup tool.
- IPv6 leak test — half-tunneled IPv6 (where IPv4 is routed through the VPN but IPv6 is not) counts as a leak. Any unmasked IPv6 address is a fail.
Speed methodology
We report the median of 25 runs per product: 5 endpoints × 5 tests each. The median eliminates outliers caused by brief network congestion. We use LibreSpeed, not Speedtest.net — LibreSpeed is open-source and doesn't throttle or prioritize known speed-test traffic the way some ISPs do with commercial testers.
Logging policy verification
We classify VPN logging policies into three tiers:
- Court-tested — the provider's no-log claim has been verified by a real legal proceeding (subpoena, seizure, or court order) with no logs produced.
- Audited — an independent firm (PwC, Cure53, Deloitte, or equivalent) has audited infrastructure within the last 24 months.
- Self-claimed only — the provider claims a no-log policy but it has not been independently verified.
What we don't do
- We don't accept free VPN copies without disclosing it — if a provider gives us a complimentary account for testing, we say so.
- We don't rank products by commission rate or affiliate deal size.
- We don't embargo negative findings — if a product fails a test, we publish that result.
Affiliate disclosure
MyIPScan participates in affiliate programs. If you click a link to a VPN provider and purchase a subscription, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. These fees do not influence our test results, rankings, or editorial conclusions. Products are evaluated the same way regardless of affiliate status.
How to fact-check us
- Run our tools yourself, client-side, in your browser — the WebRTC leak test, DNS lookup, and IP checker all run locally and don't depend on our servers to return results.
- Check court records — logging policy claims can be verified against documented legal proceedings that are matters of public record.
- Email [email protected] with corrections — if you find an error in our methodology or results, we want to know and will publish corrections.