Privacy Policy for Android
Updated: July 30 2024Since privacy is the reason for you to be using our service, we realize that we have to walk a thin line in terms of what we can collect.
We do not use any 3rd party tracking or analytics services, so your activity on this website stays with us (and your ISP). We use open source Piwik web analytics platform to measure usage on our website, which is hosted on our servers. Piwik is used to analyze in aggregate information about our website visitors. When your web browser loads a page on our site, a small snippet of JavaScript code is executed within your browser which submits information such as your browser user-agent, language, screen resolution, referring website, and a subset of your IP address (first 3 octets).
We only require a username and password when you signup to our service. Email can be provided if you wish to be able to recover your password in case you forget it, as well as receive periodic service updates. We use 3rd party payment processors. When you pay for a premium account, we store the transaction ID of your payment for a period of 30 days for fraud prevention purposes.
When you use Windscribe, we keep the following data associated with your account:
- Total amount of bytes transferred in a 30 day period. Bandwidth reset date is in your "My Account" section.
- Timestamp of your last activity on the Windscribe network.
This data is used to enforce free tier limitations, prevent abuse and weed out inactive accounts. The following data is NOT stored:
- Historical record of VPN sessions
- Source IP
- Sites you visited
We are firm believer that one's browsing history should be taken to one's grave.
For the duration of your connection the following is stored in server’s memory. This data is immediately discarded when you disconnect:
- OpenVPN/IKEv2 username
- Time of connection
- Amount of data transferred
The following data is stored in a central location:
- Number of parallel connections at any given time to prevent rampant abuse and account sharing.
- A counter is incremented that stores total number of bytes downloaded/uploaded in a 30 day period.
Anything that is not mentioned above is not stored.
If for some strange reason you decide not to use our service anymore, the only piece of information that will remain is your username, password and email address (if you provided it). We periodically prune inactive accounts. You can delete your account at any time in the "My Account" section.
Since we store the bare minimum for a customer to actually use our service, any request for user data would yield nothing of value. As we do not store any historical logs on who used which IP address, and since IPs are shared by dozens/hundreds of people at any given moment, so we cannot tie any activity to a specific account.
We will do our best to avoid any changes, which includes moving the company to a different jurisdiction. If drastic policy changes are required due to a race of giant spiders enslaving all of humanity and forcing us to log our users under the threat of consumption, and we cannot continue providing service under the above mentioned terms, users (with valid email accounts) will be notified. That will be the least of your concern however, you know, because of the giant spiders.
In order to provide you with enhanced functionality, Windscribe VPN may request background location permissions to enable the "network whitelist" feature. This functionality is specifically designed to apply per network settings to your VPN Connection by accessing your Network SSID (Service Set Identifier).
Your location data, including the Network SSID, is collected solely for the purpose of configuring and applying per-network settings within the Windscribe VPN application. It is important to note that your location data will remain stored locally on your device and will not be transmitted to any external servers or third parties
Before the app requests background location permissions, a prominent disclosure will be presented to you, explaining the necessity of this access for the "network whitelist" functionality. You have the option to deny this permission at any time through your device settings, providing you with full control over the access granted to our application.
Under no circumstances will your location data be shared with any third party. It is strictly used for the internal functionality of Windscribe VPN as described in this section.
