Windscribe is a virtual private network (VPN) with intense “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy. It has servers in 69 countries and an annual plan that costs $69, an obsession with the sex number that rivals Elon Musk’s. I’m shocked that it doesn’t have a subscription costing $4.20 per month.

But there’s another side to Windscribe’s cringe: an obsession with independence and a Bernie Sanders-like anger on behalf of an exploited public. In a market where the best VPNs aim for professionalism, Windscribe aspires to be punk. Its iconoclasm may have led it to develop an app that looks like ExpressVPN in a trash compactor, but it also spurred Windscribe to offer a strong free plan and forgo financial relationships with VPN reviewers. That attitude earned it a spot on my list of the best free VPNs.

Although Windscribe’s heart is in the right place, my job is to figure out whether that translates into a good product. I used our rigorous VPN testing procedure to rate Windscribe in 11 categories. You can find my results in the table below and a final verdict at the end of the review.

Editor’s note (1/27/26): We’ve overhauled our VPN coverage to provide more detailed, actionable buying advice. Going forward, we’ll continue to update both our best VPN list and individual reviews (like this one) as circumstances change. Most recently, we added official scores to all of our VPN reviews. Check out how we test VPNs to learn more about the new standards we’re using.

Windscribe

A VPN focused on working outside the system, with uneven download speeds but great latency.

Pros

• All locations unblock streaming
• Very fast latencies
• Highly secure and private

Cons

• Poor app design
• Support relies too much on AI chatbot
• Middling download speeds

Findings at a glance

Installing, configuring and using Windscribe

The first step is always to figure out how easy or hard the VPN is to use. Windscribe and other VPNs are important tools, but you’ll never use them if the UI gets in the way. I tested Windscribe’s desktop apps on Windows and Mac, its mobile apps on iOS and Android and its Chrome and Firefox browser extensions.

To start with, let me say that installing Windscribe is a breeze no matter where you do it. The downloaders and installers handle their own business, only requiring you to grant a few permissions. The apps arrive on your system ready to use out of the box.

Windows

The first thing you’ll notice about Windscribe is that it’s not even slightly interested in looking like any other VPN. It crams everything into an extremely compact window, which has some advantages — mainly that it’s easy to operate it while looking at another app. On the downside, well, it looks like this.

The Windscribe team will probably just say that I’m brainwashed by the establishment, but there’s a good reason that most VPNs choose designs with a little more space. This fiddly console, most of which is taken up by information you can’t interact with, is likely to confirm all a newcomer’s worst fears about using a VPN. Private Internet Access had a similar problem of tightening its app design to the point of being incomprehensible.

The problems persist when you get to the settings page. It’s easy to make sense of a VPN without technical knowledge, but Windscribe’s preferences menu does everything it can to obscure that truth. Highly technical features are mixed in with options for casual users, and the explanatory blurbs usually cloud the issue even further.

Even the “Look & Feel” settings somehow manage to be confusing. What is the difference between the Stretch, Fill and Tile modes for aspect ratio? What the heck is a Bundled background, and what does it matter whether it’s Square, Palm, Ripple, Drip or Snow? The answers to all these can be found by playing around or looking in the knowledgebase, but a VPN really shouldn’t require that for its most basic toggles.

Once you get used to Windscribe and learn where to find the features that actually matter, it runs quite smoothly. Connections are never delayed and there are none of the random error messages that have dogged me on other VPNs. In a world of VPNs that look great but run clunkily, Windscribe has built one that looks terrible but runs great. I can’t complain about how well it works, but is it too much to ask for a provider that does both? (Oh, wait, that’s Proton VPN.)

Mac

Windscribe’s macOS app is almost identical to its Windows app. That deserves praise in itself — you’ll get much the same experience no matter which type of computer you use. But it also means the Mac app shares the same problems.

There’s the same overly compact design cluttered with too much information. The same technobabble-filled options menu. And the same fundamental solidity underlying it all: a VPN that does the job beautifully but has no interest in being accessible. It would be a mistake to write Windscribe off because of its app design, but it’s important to know what you’ll have to work through.

Android

One thing I can’t fault Windscribe for is a lack of consistency. The Android app looks a lot like the Windows and Mac apps, only lightly adapted for the mobile format. On these devices, the design decisions make more sense — the UI writing is still impenetrable for casual users, but the compact pages look a lot more normal on a phone screen.

iOS

There’s not a lot to say about Windscribe on iOS that I haven’t already said about the other three main platforms. Looking over all my screenshots, it seems fairly clear that Windscribe’s problems — much like PIA’s — come from starting on mobile and trying to make that same design work on desktop. It’s still not great to look at, but I can at least see where they’re coming from.

Browser extensions

Windscribe’s extensions for Chrome and Firefox look a little like its desktop and mobile VPN apps, but they act a little differently. They serve the same basic purpose as the standalone apps — changing your IP address and location — but they’re also customizable ad blockers for the web page you’re currently on.

For example, in the image above, I can control what location Google perceives me to be in. But I can also control what gets blocked by choosing to let Google bypass certain features. Clicking the leftmost button makes the current website skip the VPN tunnel. The central button shuts off the ad blocker and the right-hand button shuts off the features on the Privacy section of the preferences menu. Like everything else about Windscribe, it’s unintuitive but works great once you figure it out.

Windscribe speed test

I used speedtest.net to test Windscribe’s speeds. In case you aren’t familiar with the jargon, Ping measures a server’s latency, which is how long it takes a single packet of data to reach it from your device. Download speed measures how much data can be downloaded at a time, while upload speed shows how quickly you can send data to the network. Think of ping as your car’s speed in miles per hour and download and upload speed as the amount of traffic on the road.

As usual, I used the WireGuard protocol to run these tests, since it’s almost always the fastest. Starting with my unprotected speeds at home in Portland, I moved gradually farther away until I was connecting to the other side of the world. Ideally, ping should increase linearly (not exponentially), while download and upload speeds don’t dip much at all. I’ve recorded Windscribe’s performance in the table below.

Windscribe gave me some of the shortest latencies I’ve ever seen — comparable to CyberGhost, whose ping lengths I was also very impressed by. Its download and upload speeds also look a lot like CyberGhost’s, with both firmly in good-but-not-amazing territory.

However, Windscribe’s speeds were a lot more consistent. Throughout the tests, I hardly ever saw major fluctuations in the same location, on any metric. The Nairobi server seemed to be under some strain, but that’s not unusual for a VPN in Africa. Every location except for that one followed a smooth downward curve. I’m happy with that; speed is one of the areas where you want your VPN to be reliably boring, not flashy.

Practically, a speed test like this suggests that Windscribe is best for gaming, livestreaming and video chatting, and that it’s perfectly serviceable for any other task you could do online. You may not get the best speeds you’ve ever seen, but unless your internet is bad to begin with, Windscribe should not slow it down enough to be noticeable.

Windscribe security test

I can say up top that Windscribe doesn’t seem to have any dangerous security flaws, but I’ll take this section to explain why I think that. To start with, it uses only the three VPN protocols currently known to be secure: WireGuard, OpenVPN and IKEv2, plus a few other options all based on OpenVPN. With those options, you can be sure you’re getting encryption that’s currently uncrackable.

It also passed two batteries of tests I ran on its security. The first set of tests looks for DNS leaks, WebRTC leaks and other slip-ups that might reveal your real IP address. The second checks whether data packets sent through the VPN tunnel are actually getting encrypted. Check each section below for details on how Windscribe did.

VPN protocols

A VPN protocol determines how exactly a VPN makes contact between its own servers, your device and your ISP. Certain protocols can make your VPN run faster, stabilize a shaky connection or get into websites other protocols fail to unlock. If you’re having a problem with your VPN, changing the protocol is one of the first troubleshooting steps.

Windscribe makes a total of six protocols available, though it’s really just three, since four of the six are variations on OpenVPN. WireGuard works on every platform, and is currently the fastest and most stable — its drawback used to be that it was new, but with the passage of time, it’s no longer new enough to make it suspect.

IKEv2 is a connection protocol that uses the separate IPSec protocol for its security. This double team’s main strength is reconnecting to the VPN when a device switches networks; it’s also good at not draining phone batteries. Windscribe supports IKEv2 on Mac, iOS and Windows.

OpenVPN is the oldest open-source VPN protocol, refined by over a decade of repeated probing by volunteers. It’s not only relatively fast and highly secure, but comes in two flavors: TCP, which makes connections more stable, and UDP, which is usually faster and should be your first resort with OpenVPN. Windscribe supports OpenVPN on all platforms.

Windscribe rounds out the selection with two unique protocols, both focused on hiding your VPN traffic from firewalls and censors. Stealth uses the same connection ports as HTTPS, so it can’t be blocked by shutting certain ports down entirely. WStunnel obfuscates connections even further by using the extremely common WebSocket technology to establish VPN connections. Both these proprietary protocols are much slower than the other options, but can save you if you find yourself repeatedly blocked while using Windscribe.

Leak test

I started my leak tests by using ipleak.net to check several Windscribe servers for IP leaks of all sorts. Each time I connected and checked my location, I only saw the VPN server’s IP address, never my real one. I tried to trip Windscribe up by switching servers while remaining connected, even changing continents, but my true location never once slipped out. This puts its security solidly above CyberGhost, Norton VPN and many others.

Windscribe automatically blocks IPv6 traffic while connected, so IPv6 leaks weren’t going to be a thing. I finished the test by checking five servers using browserleaks.com/webrtc, finding no issues each time.

Encryption test

The final step is to make sure Windscribe is applying encryption properly through its VPN protocols. For this test, I used a free packet sniffer app called Wireshark to look directly at what my computer was sending out.

It’s a bit hard to tell what’s going on, but to summarize, I’ve loaded a website without HTTPS protection and checked whether Windscribe managed to apply that protection. The lack of readable information in the data stream proves that its encryption is indeed working as expected.

How much does Windscribe cost?

Windscribe has three subscription options (not counting its free plan, which I’ll discuss in a moment). One month of Pro service costs $9.00 — after Mullvad, the second-cheapest monthly subscription to a top-tier VPN. You can also pay $69 for a 12-month Pro subscription, working out to $5.75 per month. Both of these tiers give you the exact same set of Pro features and can be used on unlimited simultaneous devices.

The third option is to build your own plan. Build-A-Plan is an interesting beast that’s unique to Windscribe. When you choose a custom plan, you must spend at least $3 per month. Gaining access to all the Pro servers in a country costs $1. For each country you add, you get an additional 10GB of data per month on top of the 10GB already included for free.

If you’d rather not budget your data at all, you can pay another $1 for unlimited data, plus 10 custom rules for the R.O.B.E.R.T. content blocker (I’ll untangle the tortured acronym soon). It’s a little convoluted, but wonderfully flexible. You can even change your Build-A-Plan in the middle of the subscription period.

Windscribe also offers shared static IPs for an extra fee. You can add a datacenter IP to any plan for $2 per month or a residential IP (usually better at getting around restrictions) for $8 per month. Team billing is also available through ScribeForce at $3 per seat per month, including a centralized management panel.

The Windscribe free plan

Windscribe isn’t the overall best free VPN — hide.me wins that honor with its more flexible data limit — but it’s close. Free users get access to servers in 10 countries: the US, Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Germany, Switzerland, Romania and Hong Kong. If you plot that on a map, you’ll see that the Windscribe free plan is most useful in North America and Europe.

Free users start with a data allotment of 2GB per month. The monthly limit rises to 10GB if you sign up with a confirmed email address and 15GB if you post about Windscribe on Twitter/X. That’s enough for casual browsing, but streaming in standard definition takes about 1GB per hour, so you won’t be doing much binge-watching.

On the upside, a free plan gives you access to all Windscribe’s features except for dynamic port forwarding. You can set three R.O.B.E.R.T. rules and use your free account on an infinite number of devices (subject to the usual restrictions about exploiting that for commercial purposes — as Windscribe itself states, no one person has 30 devices that need a VPN).

Windscribe side apps and bundles

Windscribe doesn’t have any add-ons of its own except for static IP addresses. However, it does offer discount codes for a group of “partners in privacy” that share its business ethics. The coupon codes are available here and don’t require a Windscribe subscription to use.

There are currently five allies in the gang. Control D offers DNS filtering for organizations to block unwanted websites; the Windscribe coupon gives you 50 percent off. You can get 25 percent off a one-year subscription to addy.io, an open-source email anonymizer, and Ente, an encrypted storage space for photos and videos.

Rounding out the team are Kagi, a private search engine which you can use for three months free with the Windscribe coupon, and Notesnook, an encrypted notes app. Windscribe’s coupon gives you a 10% discount on Notesnook’s yearly plans in perpetuity.

Close-reading Windscribe’s privacy policy

Windscribe’s marketing positions it as serious about user independence, so I came into this section hoping for a privacy policy that backs those words up. An early green flag is that the policy is short, succinct and obviously written to be read by the users themselves. It’s also fantastic that you can sign up without an email address (though you will need one to get the full data allotment on the free plan).

Windscribe gathers information on its website using Piwik, an open-source analytics tool that it manages itself; no third parties are involved. The Windscribe app itself collects no information except for the amount of data used in a month, the time of your last connection and the number of devices you have online at once. When actively connected, it also gives you an anonymized username necessary for the OpenVPN and IKEv2 protocols.

My only quibble is that Windscribe is oddly reluctant to identify which third-party payment processors it uses. The information does exist elsewhere — an article in the knowledgebase states that payments are handled by “trusted third party processors such as PayPal and Stripe,” and another page says that CoinPayments handles cryptocurrency transactions. It’s a small thing, but the rest of the policy is so airtight that it stands out.

Independent privacy audits

Windscribe’s apps are fully open-source (you can find them on Github here). In addition to this general exposure, it’s also undergone three intensive audits from security firms. Leviathan Security looked into its desktop apps in 2021 and its mobile apps in 2022. The auditors made a total of five high-severity recommendations, all of which Windscribe claims to have addressed.

More recently, Windscribe had its entire codebase audited by PacketLabs. The auditors’ June 2024 report found that some of Windscribe’s code was storing more user information than it strictly needed to. Windscribe also claims to have handled this risk. More importantly, PacketLabs found no intentional subversions of Windscribe’s no-logs policy, so its privacy statements can likely be trusted.

Further corroboration of the latter came from a 2025 court case in which Windscribe founder and CEO Yegor Sak was indicted in Greece and charged with a crime committed by a Windscribe user through an IP address in Finland. This case is obviously absurd — like charging the head of GM with a single instance of vehicular manslaughter committed by someone driving a Buick — but Sak was obliged to appear in court anyway.

As Sak writes in the linked post, he could have turned over the logs and shown who actually committed the crime, but he couldn’t since Windscribe doesn’t keep that information. Had there been an alternative to waging an expensive and inconvenient legal campaign in another country, Sak would surely have taken it. The fact that he didn’t is strong proof of Windscribe’s no-logging policy.

Can Windscribe change your virtual location?

Changing your IP address with a VPN can do more than just anonymize your internet activity. A service like Windscribe can give you an IP address associated with a certain country or region, letting you use the internet like you were there. This has applications ranging from the serious (break out of a nationwide firewall to document human rights issues) to the fun (get new titles on streaming platforms without paying for a new subscription).

Netflix is a great tool for testing whether a VPN can change your virtual location. Like most streamers, it tries to block all VPN access to protect the copyrights it holds. Consequently, if a VPN can crack Netflix, it must be serious about keeping its server network fresh to foil any potential blockers.

For this test, I tried to access Netflix three times each through five different Windscribe server locations, refreshing the connection to use different servers each time. I looked for successful Netflix access, plus different content to prove my location had actually changed.

Windscribe got a perfect score. Netflix loaded easily every time, and the content was always localized to the country I chose. With this performance combined with its fairly consistent speeds over long distances, Windscribe makes a nearly perfect streaming VPN. The only downside is that the data limits on the free plan mean you’ll probably have to pay for serious streaming time.

Investigating Windscribe’s server network

Windscribe has 193 server locations in 71 countries, which it insists on listing as “69+” (again, hilarious). Although 193 sounds like a lot, many of them are duplicate locations in the same city. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but for accuracy’s sake, the total number of cities with Windscribe servers is 122.

The bigger story here is Windscribe’s spurning of virtual servers. A virtual server location is physically located in a different region than the one it outwardly displays. For example, a server with an Indian IP address might really be in Singapore. Throughout the entire Windscribe network, only two servers are virtual: one in India and one in Antarctica.

This is both good and bad. On the positive side, the near-total lack of virtual servers means you can be sure of how any server will perform. If it says it’s in Buenos Aires, it’ll run like it’s in Buenos Aires — you won’t be surprised with lagging speeds because it’s really in Miami. This also makes it clear that Windscribe isn’t interested in pumping up its network size for marketing purposes.

On the other hand, virtual locations aren’t an inherently bad thing. Windscribe acts as though advertising hype is the only reason any VPN would employ them, but there are real use cases. Virtual servers can be used to place locations inside countries where real servers would risk confiscation by the government, like Russia, India and China. Windscribe chooses instead to place real servers in Russia and India, both of which have data retention laws that directly conflict with its own privacy policy.

Does this mean that using Windscribe’s Russian servers will earn you a midnight visit from the FSB? Probably not. Assuming Windscribe is following its no-logs policy (which appears to be the case), there won’t be any user data on those servers if the government seizes them. But it does mean they’re effectively running illegal data centers which could be raided and shut down at any time. Be aware of this if you depend on Windscribe’s locations in Russia or India.

Extra features of Windscribe

As covered in the UI section, Windscribe has a lot going on in its apps. The Connection tab alone has 13 different features, including two submenus with several options of their own. With this many options, and so many of them highly situational, I won’t be able to cover every nook and cranny without this review getting seriously bloated. I’ve instead chosen some of the most important and illustrative features to give you a clear sense of the whole picture.

Network Options

You’ll find this feature at the top of the Connection tab. When you click Network Options, you should see the name of your current Wi-Fi network and all the others your Windscribe account has discovered. This feature lets you control how the VPN reacts to each network it encounters, not unlike CyberGhost’s Smart Rules.

The app does a remarkably poor job of explaining how this works, so I’ll break it down for you here. When the Auto-Secure Networks switch is turned on, Windscribe will automatically mark each new network as Secured — a word which here means “Windscribe turns on when it encounters the network.”

So far, so good. But if you turn Auto-Secure Networks off, things get weird. Without it, Windscribe tags every network you encounter as Unsecured. Whenever you connect to an Unsecured network, Windscribe immediately disconnects itself. This means it secures all Secured networks and does not secure any Unsecured networks.

It feels backwards until you realize that Windscribe is referring entirely to itself here. “Secured” doesn’t mean that the Wi-Fi network is password-protected or otherwise considered safe, and “Unsecured” doesn’t mean that it’s open to the public without a password. All that matters is whether or not you want Windscribe to activate or deactivate on that network. It’s a useful feature that even lets you choose a VPN protocol for each network, but it would help to bring it more in line with mainstream terminology.

R.O.B.E.R.T.

This mouthful of a feature name allegedly stands for Remote Omnidirectional Badware Eliminating Robotic Tool. This is perhaps the apex of the VPN industry’s unfortunate habit of saddling perfectly good features with word-salad names (yes, I’m aware it’s supposed to be funny).

R.O.B.E.R.T. is perhaps the most customizable content blocker on any VPN right now. To start with, it includes eight lists of sites it blocks at the DNS level: Malware, Ad + Trackers, Social Networks, Porn, Gambling, Clickbait, Other VPNs and Crypto. These vary in usefulness, and you can’t determine the contents of each list, but it’s nice to have such a range of choices.

Where R.O.B.E.R.T really shines, though, is in its browser-based customization dashboard. Each Free user can make three custom rules, and Pro upgrades that to 10. Each custom rule can be used to block a specific website or network or allowlist it from one of the other general blocklists. You can also set it to spoof a domain, though there’s no practical reason to do this (Windscribe’s idea of a “useful” application is making your friends think your post made the front page of Reddit).

Split tunneling

Split tunneling sends some of your internet requests through the VPN tunnel while others go unencrypted as normal. This can be useful if you get worse-than-usual speeds and want to minimize the amount of traffic going through the VPN, or for certain websites that refuse to work with any VPN server.

You can split tunnel on Windscribe’s apps for Windows, Mac and Android. Windows and Android users can split by app or website, while Mac users can only split by website. Windscribe lets you choose whether your split tunnel will be inclusive (only apps and IPs on the list will go through the VPN) or exclusive (the apps and IPs on the list will not go through the VPN). Note that R.O.B.E.R.T. rules apply to the entire system, even excluded apps and domains.

Firewall and Always On VPN

Instead of a kill switch, which it derides as an incomplete solution, Windscribe includes a Firewall feature on desktop and an Always On VPN feature on mobile. The Firewall can be considered a strong kill switch that prevents any internet traffic from going outside the VPN tunnel — something doesn’t have to go wrong for the blocks to activate. Always On VPN on iOS and Android is functionally the same.

A more proactive defense has its advantages, but it would be nice if Windscribe included the weak kill switch option. Kill switches and firewalls can be overactive, and sometimes, you don’t want the strongest level of security.

Circumvent Censorship

This feature is designed to let you access Windscribe on networks that don’t want you to use a VPN, from school and work systems to entire censorious countries like China. Windscribe isn’t forthcoming about how it works, but it’s probably a deep-packet obfuscation that makes VPN traffic look like regular traffic. I didn’t have time to pop over to China and test Circumvent Censorship, but I’m glad it exists.

Windscribe customer support options

Clicking the question mark tab on the Windscribe app shows you the full list of support options. You can peruse the knowledgebase, ask their chatbot Garry, talk directly to a human or check out their user communities on Reddit and Discord.

I started with the written FAQs. At the top of the knowledgebase, there’s a row of buttons you can click to see only articles relating to a particular operating system. This is a good idea in theory, but it’s not implemented very well — there’s no visible tagging system, so we can’t see how it’s deciding which articles to filter.

The search bar is much more likely to get you where you need to go. It works instantaneously and always turns up relevant articles, though it’s weirdly insistent on showing exactly 10 results. I have few complaints about articles themselves, which are written in a way any user should find useful (give or take yet more attempted humor).

I tested the chatbot, Garry, by asking it about the mysterious Advanced Parameters tab of the Windscribe app. It explained each feature on that tab (none of which should be touched except by users with technical knowledge) in a spiel that was clearly pre-written but nonetheless useful. Garry was launched in 2018, when IBM Watson was the biggest thing in AI, and recently revamped into “Garry 2.0” — whether this is based on OpenAI or another platform is anyone’s guess at the moment.

Live support

Windscribe appears to handle all of its own support, without outsourcing to Zendesk or a similar third party. If you decide not to go through Garry, Windscribe does have the option of connecting directly to a human. However, the Contact Humans option on the app sends you directly back to Garry. It’s eventually possible to get Garry to connect you to a real person, but that doesn’t excuse Windscribe building an outright lie into its app.

The Contact Support button on the knowledgebase, which I expected to lead to a ticket submission, also sends you straight to Garry. Windscribe really, really wants you to use Garry, in case that wasn’t clear. You might have a better time going straight to the Windscribe Discord server or the r/Windscribe subreddit, both of which are linked to in the app.

Windscribe background check

Windscribe eschews a lot of the things we’ve come to expect from a VPN provider. It doesn’t pay for ads anywhere. It has no affiliate relationships with news sites. The only thing resembling a Windscribe ad campaign is the free-plan data reward for Xeeting about it. It doesn’t even have any venture capital investors — it’s completely self-funded and self-hosted.

As a jaded and cynical reviewer who was already annoyed by Windscribe’s memelord attitude, I was prepared to sniff out any hypocrisy in its background, which makes it all the more impressive that I didn’t find any. Since its founding in Canada in 2016, Windscribe has never once been involved in any public doings that contradict its statements of ethics. It’s even given free unlimited VPN access to every journalist working in Ukraine.

The only thing I could find resembling a controversy was an incident in July 2021 when Ukrainian police confiscated two servers that weren’t fully encrypted. Although this would only have posed a risk to users running a customized connection profile under very specific conditions, it was still a lapse. Windscribe responded appropriately in my view, ending the legacy OpenVPN implementation that caused the problem.

Canadian headquarters

Windscribe is based in Canada, which is one of the Five Eyes nations (along with the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand). This sounds scary, but it’s not actually an issue, as Yegor Sak himself points out in a blog post I reference frequently.

Five Eyes is not an organization, but an agreement between five allied countries to share necessary intelligence with each other. This can absolutely be misused. If the U.S. government wants to spy on someone without running into the 4th Amendment, it can ask the Brits to spy on that person instead and tell them what they find, knowing the Constitution can’t determine what other countries do to our citizens.

As bad as that is for our civil liberties, it doesn’t actually change anything where VPNs are concerned. If a VPN isn’t logging user data, there shouldn’t be anything for any of the Five Eyes (or Nine Eyes or Fourteen Eyes) nations to find. And if it is keeping logs, you shouldn’t be using it no matter where its headquarters are.

Final verdict

You might wonder, at this point, why my distaste for Windscribe’s tryhard sense of humor has featured so prominently in this review. One reason is that I had to read a lot of it this week, and you must suffer as I have suffered. But it also makes Windscribe look very good by implication. Having no patience for the discount-4chan act that pervades Windscribe’s brand, I was primed to dislike the VPN itself — and I simply couldn’t.

This is not to say I had no problems at all with Windscribe. Its physical servers in Russia are difficult to trust. Its help options lean way too heavily on Garry the chatbot. Its app design and UI writing are significant faults. The free plan doesn’t give you enough data for streaming.

Having said all that, though, Windscribe does everything else right. It changes virtual locations and unblocks Netflix without breaking a sweat. Its servers keep latencies low, and download speeds remain solid across the world. The apps may look bad, but they never break down. Some features, like R.O.B.E.R.T. and Auto-Secure, are both useful to everybody and deeply customizable for power users.

Windscribe may be best for privacy nerds who know how all its doohickeys work, but it’s a VPN I recommend for everybody. In a world of predatory software, it’s a relief to use an app that’s unabashedly on the customer’s side.

A post on the Android Developers Blog today highlights the “new” embedded photo picker and its use in Google Messages.

Developers can integrate the photo picker into their applications instead of just having a system sheet slide up for a more seamless experience. Overall, this approach “eliminates the need for users to switch between apps or worry about whether the photo they want is stored locally or in the cloud.” On the privacy front, apps don’t need “access to the user’s photos or videos until they actually select something.”

In a Google Messages chat, tapping the gallery icon in the text field brings up the combined camera and embedded photo picker interface. Upon scrolling, the reverse chronological grid of images and videos expands to take up the entire screen, with Messages noting “To [contact]” at the top.

As always, you can “Search Google Photos” and switch to the “Collections” tab for your Favorites, Camera, From this device, From your apps, and other albums/folders.

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The Android team also highlights how the embedded photo picker in Messages offers:

• Intuitive placement: The photo picker sits right below the camera button, giving users a clear choice between capturing a new photo or selecting an existing one.
• Dynamic preview: Immediately after a user taps a photo, they see a large preview, making it easy to confirm their selection. If they deselect the photo, the preview disappears, keeping the experience clean and uncluttered.
• Expand for more content: The initial view is simplified, offering easy access to recent photos. However, users can easily expand the photo picker to browse and choose from all photos and videos in their library, including cloud content from Google Photos.
• Respecting user choices: The embedded photo picker only grants access to the specific photos or videos the user selects, meaning they can stop requesting the photo and video permissions altogether. This also saves the Messages [app] from needing to handle situations where users only grant limited access to photos and videos.

Google Messages’ use of the embedded photo picker is a few months old at this point. It’s available on Android 14+ (with SDK Extensions 15+).

Meta has faced some serious questions about how it allows its underage users to interact with AI-powered chatbots. Most recently, internal communications obtained by the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office revealed that although Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was opposed to the chatbots having “explicit” conversations with minors, he also rejected the idea of placing parental controls on the feature.

Reuters reported that in an exchange between two unnamed Meta employees, one wrote that we “pushed hard for parental controls to turn GenAI off – but GenAI leadership pushed back stating Mark decision.” In its statement to the publication, Meta accused the New Mexico Attorney General of “cherry picking documents to paint a flawed and inaccurate picture.” New Mexico is suing Meta on charges that the company “failed to stem the tide of damaging sexual material and sexual propositions delivered to children;” the case is scheduled to go to trial in February.

Despite only being available for a brief time, Meta’s chatbots have already accumulated quite a history of behavior that veers into offensive if not outright illegal. In April 2025, The Wall Street Journal released an investigation that found Meta’s chatbots could engage in fantasy sex conversations with minors, or could be directed to mimic a minor and engage in sexual conversation. The report claimed that Zuckerberg had wanted looser guards implemented around Meta’s chatbots, but a spokesperson denied that the company had overlooked protections for children and teens.

Internal review documents revealed in August 2025 detailed several hypothetical situations of what chatbot behaviors would be permitted, and the lines between sensual and sexual seemed pretty hazy. The document also permitted the chatbots to argue racist concepts. At the time, a representative told Engadget that the offending passages were hypotheticals rather than actual policy, which doesn’t really seem like much of an improvement, and that they were removed from the document.

Despite the multiple instances of questionable use of the chatbots, Meta only decided to suspend teen accounts’ access to them last week. The company said it is temporarily removing access while it develops the parental controls that Zuckerberg had allegedly rejected using.

“Parents have long been able to see if their teens have been chatting with AIs on Instagram, and in October we announced our plans to go further, building new tools to give parents more control over their teens’ experiences with AI characters,” a representative from Meta said. “Last week we once again reinforced our commitment to delivering on our promise of parental controls for AI, pausing teen access to AI characters completely until the updated version is ready.”

New Mexico filed this lawsuit against Meta in December 2023 on claims that the company’s platforms failed to protect minors from harassment by adults. Internal documents revealed early on in that complaint revealed that 100,000 child users were harassed daily on Meta’s services.

Update, January 27, 2025, 6:52PM ET: Added statement from Meta spokesperson.

Update, January 27, 2025, 6:15PM ET: Corrected misstated timeline of the New Mexico lawsuit, which was filed in December 2023, not December 2024.

Samsung is teasing the Galaxy S26’s new “Privacy display” feature in a series of new videos that showcase how the feature will keep your screen private from nearby onlookers.

We’ve all been trying to use our phone in public and, from time to time, there’s just information on the screen you don’t want anyone else to see. That’s why privacy screen protectors have been pretty popular, with the ability to hide your display from anyone looking at an off-angle.

And, on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, Samsung is expected to build this feature directly into the device with a new “Privacy display” feature, and that’s the focus of Samsung’s first teaser.

Shared today, Samsung says that it “will soon unveil a new layer of privacy to shield your phone from shoulder surfing wherever you go,” adding that it’s “coming to Galaxy very soon” referring to the Galaxy S26 series. Samsung never explicitly names the feature “Privacy display,” but that name was seen in a screenshot the company itself shared earlier this month.

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In a few videos (that we’re unfortunately unable to embed), Samsung shows how the display’s contents disappear when you view it from an off-angle.

The new information here is that Samsung says this feature isn’t an “all or nothing,” letting users protect certain parts of the display such as notifications, specific apps, or when handling sensitive tasks such as inputting a password.

Samsung explains:

Not everyone needs the same level of privacy. This new layer gives you the choice to decide what works best for you. You can customize it to raise your guard with specific apps, or when entering access details for more private areas of your phone. With multiple settings for adjusting visibility, you can limit what others can see based on the level of privacy protection you need.

You can also choose to protect specific parts of your experience, such as notification pop-ups. It’s a tailored approach that you can fine-tune or switch off entirely, rather than a blanket one.

It took over five years of engineering, testing and refining to get here. We studied how people use their phones, what they consider private, and how security should feel in everyday life. The result is a fusion of hardware and software expertly calibrated to protect you without getting in your way.

It sounds really cool, but Samsung is rumored to support the feature solely on the Galaxy S26 Ultra, rather than offering it on the standard and Plus models as well.

The Galaxy S26 series is expected to launch in late February.

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The European Commission has started proceedings to ensure Google complies with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) in certain ways. Specifically, the European Union’s executive arm has told Google to grant third-party AI services the same level of access to Android that Gemini has. “The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices,” the Commission said in a statement.

The company will also have to hand over “anonymized ranking, query, click and view data held by Google Search” to rival search engines. The Commission says this will help competing companies to optimize their services and offer more viable alternatives to Google Search.

“Today’s proceedings under the Digital Markets Act will provide guidance to Google to ensure that third-party online search engines and AI providers enjoy the same access to search data and Android operating system as Google’s own services, like Google Search or Gemini,” said Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy. “Our goal is to keep the AI market open, unlock competition on the merits and promote innovation, to the benefit of consumers and businesses.”

The Commission plans to wrap up these proceedings in the next six months, effectively handing Google a deadline to make all of this happen. If the company doesn’t do so to the Commission’s satisfaction, it may face a formal investigation and penalties down the line. The Commission can impose fines of up to 10 percent of a company’s global annual revenue for a DMA violation.

Google was already in hot water with the EU for allegedly favoring its own services — such as travel, finance and shopping — over those from rivals and stopping Google Play app developers from easily directing consumers to alternative, cheaper ways to pay for digital goods and services. The bloc charged Google with DMA violations related to those issues last March.

In November, the EU opened an investigation into Google’s alleged demotion of commercial content on news websites in search results. The following month, it commenced a probe into Google’s AI practices, including whether the company used online publishers’ material for AI Overviews and AI Mode without “appropriate compensation” or offering the ability to opt out.