Privacy

The VPN Proxy Master privacy policy includes plenty of detail on its logging policy, stating: “We do not collect logs of your activity, including no logging of browsing history, traffic destination, data content, or DNS queries. We also never store connection logs, i.e., no logs of your IP address, your outgoing VPN IP address, connection timestamp, or session duration.”

While that sounds great, there’s, well, a problem. If you put those lines into Google, you find they’re taken directly from ExpressVPN’s own privacy policy.

Maybe the terms and conditions displayed when installing the Windows app would be more useful? There are certainly many more quote-worthy clauses: ‘We do not log any user activity (sites visited, DNS lookups, emails etc.) We only log access attempts to our servers (for security and troubleshooting).’

But returning to Google, we found many of these are also used by numerous small VPNs, and most likely come from a PureVPN privacy policy of several years ago.

This isn’t entirely a cut-and-paste job. VPN Proxy Master has added some text of its own, but it’s so awkwardly phrased and tricky to understand – ‘Our VPN APP is a non-obligatory log network’ – that you can see why it might have ‘borrowed’ content from elsewhere.

Unless a VPN has gone through a security audit, the privacy policy and no-logging claims are the only indicators of what the service might be doing. If it wants to earn your trust, it’s vital the company is open and transparent. By representing other company’s text as its own, VPN Proxy Master is neither, and we see no reason to trust it at all.

Apps

The Windows app downloads and installs easily, then displays a window suggesting you purchase a commercial plan. It’s easy to assume that’s your only option, but click the tiny Back arrow at the top-left of the window and you’re able to use the basic free service.

Checking the app files, we found some binaries from Project V. This enables managing obfuscated connections outside of the VPN using several protocols (Socks, HTTP, Shadowsocks, VMess). It’s a very good package, but we’re unsure why it’s included here, especially when there’s no mention of any related features on VPN Proxy Master’s site.

Normally we wouldn’t have been too concerned, but given our lack of trust in VPN Proxy Master, we spent a while monitoring the files and the app’s connections. We spotted nothing harmful, and so while we’d like to know what the V2ray files are for, we’ll treat this as simply ‘unexplained’ rather than any kind of issue.

Signing in can be difficult, as the website allows creating passwords which aren’t supported by the login process. When we first tried logging in, the app displayed a brief ‘JSON invalid’ message, before leaving us to try again. We realized this was most likely because our password included a curly bracket, so we replaced it, and then all was well; users who aren’t sure what JSON is, however, could easily have wasted a long time trying to solve the problem.

The app interface is very basic. By default, it selects the best location for you, but Premium users can choose from the full set of locations, then connect and disconnect with a click. That’s essentially it: there’s no Favorites system, no server load figures, no kill switch or choice of protocol. There’s a ‘Start on launch’ toggle, but that’s the only setting we found.

VPN Proxy Master doesn’t provide any significant details on how it connects, so we took a very close look at the Windows app. It turned out to be using OpenVPN, with AES-128-CBC encryption and 160-bit SHA1 for HMAC authentication, and using a certificate signed by QuickBird, a now-defunct Chinese company.

That’s weaker encryption than we’ll usually see – other providers might use AES-256-CBC or GCM, maybe SHA512 – but it’s still enough to keep your activities safe from casual snoopers. And if you’re doing anything privacy-critical, you probably shouldn’t be using VPN Proxy Master, anyway.

The service underperformed on the DNS front, too. Other providers might use their own encrypted DNS on the VPN server; VPN Proxy Master set up our device to use Google DNS.

If you’re using the free plan, keep in mind that the app’s ‘optimal’ setting doesn’t mean it’ll choose a location in your country. When we connected from the UK, we were mostly allocated servers in the Netherlands or Germany.

VPN Proxy Master doesn’t claim to have a kill switch, but we were interested to see what would happen if we dropped the VPN connection.

The answer turned out to be ‘nothing’ – the app interface didn’t change, and it still told us we were connected, even though we were now using our regular unprotected internet connection. That’s a poor result; even apps without a kill switch should be able to detect a dropped VPN, notify the user and try to reconnect.

Netflix

VPN Proxy Master’s Premium plan gets you access to specialist streaming servers for unblocking Disney+, Canadian Netflix, BT, as well as a single Netherlands location which supports P2P.

That’s not exactly a lengthy list, but the service unblocked Disney+ and Netflix for us, so we’re not going to complain.

We also had some success with other platforms, whenn= connecting via VPN Proxy Master’s regular servers. The UK server got us into BBC iPlayer, for instance, while connecting to the US unblocked Amazon Prime Video. But we had some failures, too – the Netflix site refused to load properly when we connected via standard US locations – so if you need support for a platform we’ve not mentioned, sign up for the trial and check it out before you buy.